The “Sweet” Sixteen Candy Shop Cake : Part 1 – The Baking

When my Aunt and I first started planning for Morgan’s sixteenth birthday party we had such a random hodge podge of ideas we liked or wanted to try that I figured it would be best if we could decide on a theme we could both stick to. Of course my Aunt and I are complete opposites when it comes to our personal styles. She’s more the “go big or go home!” loud and flashy type, and wanted a fancy prom-esqe, red carpet party with lots of black and silver, stars and glitz. While I’m much more fanciful and romantic and wanted to do a fairy tale, enchanted forest style party. It was a very 007 vs. Taylor Swift kind of situation. Not a patch of common ground in sight!
Luckily I thought to ask her best friend what Morgan would like best. I mean we should probably be thinking about the birthday girl right?! And who knows her better than her best friend? Turns out we were both completely delusional in our old age, and she suggested that we go with something involving candy and bright colors. So when my Aunt came across this cake on pinterest she knew it was perfect.
2012 Wilton Yearbook cover cake

And when I say she thought it was perfect, that’s exactly what I mean. All I could do was stare at it and think “What the what! You want me to make that?!?!?!” Sure I’ve made a few fun cakes before, but this thing is HUGE! And then I have to somehow transport it from Virginia all the way up to Pennsylvania without anything happening to it! It’s pretty safe to say that “freaking out” would have been an understatement for my reaction.  But since it’s for family, and because I’m a sucker, I agreed to make it for her despite my reservations.

My downsized version of the 2012 Wilton Yearbook cover cake.
Please forgive the wonky photo, but the lighting wasn’t the best.

It turns out this was actually the cake on the cover of the 2012 Wilton Yearbook, and it feeds 215 people. The original cake was 18″ for the bottom, 14″ for the center, and 10″ for the top tier, with a cupcake made using one of those specialty shaped pans. Like I said…HUGE! 

We only needed to feed about 40-50 people so I decided to downsize my version and used 12″, 10″,and  8″ rounds with a pair of 4″ rounds for the cupcake on top. Unfortunately I didn’t realize until everything was baked that my proportions were off (12, 8, 4 is more even), but by then it was too late. Oh well, I never claimed to be a baker, and we still ended up with WAY more cake that we needed.

Baking German chocolate cake

Now for the fun part!

The whole cake took me roughly 38 hours over 5 days to finish and used…

3 batches of German Chocolate cake from scratch (bottom tier)

3 boxes of Butter Yellow cake mix (middle tier)

2 batches of Red Velvet cake from scratch (top tier & cupcake)

4 batches of my favorite Bakery Style Frosting

7 batches of Marshmallow Fondant

1 batch of Royal Icing

and a total of 23 lbs. of powered sugar

23 POUNDS!!!!!!!!

Talk about a sugar coma.

And a big mess…

Powdered sugar explosion

Prepping to make marshmallow fondant
Yep, that’s 7 bags of marshmallows!
Aurelia helping me bake the "Sweet" 16 cake

A mess that was definitely made much worse than necessary thanks to my little helper. 
Imagine what happens when you turn the mixer on full speed if the only things in it are a few
eggs and 4 bottles of red food coloring! Trust me, it isn’t pretty! But at least she had fun.
That’s it for part 1. Stop back tomorrow to see the details on
how I went about decorating this ginormous confection!
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5 thoughts on “The “Sweet” Sixteen Candy Shop Cake : Part 1 – The Baking”

    1. Thanks Samantha! Of course there are always little things you wish you had done better, but I'm secretly in love with my version of the cupcake icing. This cake was just screaming for a cherry on top!

      Reply

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