Chinese Take-Out Box

This cake is in Confetti Cakes cookbook. I could hardly wait for an excuse to try it out. We planned a big Chinese dinner for my aunt and uncle and seemed to me a perfect excuse to make the cake.

Thankfully I tested it out on family first. This cake took a lot of careful measuring and cutting. This can be hard to concentrate on with a 3 year old and a 7 month old running my life. So there are a couple little mistakes and the fondant bubbled out a little in the heat. Overall, it was a success.
The inside is chocolate pound cake and ganache filling. Very tasty. I did have to do two pound cakes. Lesson one: do not try baking late at night after a very tiring day. I forgot about the cake, did not hear the timer, and it turned into a chocolate pound cracker. The second one was delicious.

Cake Tutorial

This is my first cake tutorial blog post! I hope you find it useful.
Anyone can make a beautiful and delicious cake.

Tomorrow is my husband's birthday. I told him I would make any kind of cake he wanted.
As a general rule, Brent loves any recipe by Paula Deen. A quick online search led me to this recipe by Paula Deen. Brent looked through the list of ingredients and said "this is the one."

This tutorial is mainly to help you ice a cake without cake crumbs being dragged into the frosting.

Looking at the three finished cakes I knew right away it would end up with red crumbs unless I dirty iced the cake.


In a matter of minutes, I whipped up a fresh batch of very simple buttercream. Unsalted butter, vanilla, meringue powder, powdered sugar, and water.
Make it thin consistency for easy spreading.



Dirty icing, or crumb coating, is a baker's secret to pretty cakes. Spread on a thin layer of buttercream and do not worry about cake crumbs, it can be all speckled and that is ok. Once the cake is dirty iced, take a damp paper towel and wipe off icing that may have found its way to the edge of your cake plate.
Place the cake in the fridge for about 30 minutes so the icing hardens.

Then gently spread on your final layer of frosting, crumb free!

For Brent's cake, I piped on some of the buttercream around the bottom edge in random cloud like swirls and garnished it with pecan halves. Looks good enough to eat.