Welcome to day two of my Cake for Dummies series! Let’s talk levelling.
So why, you may ask, do I need to slice the perfectly delicious top off my cakes? It’s simple: flat cakes stack nicely and will give you a better finished look than if you stack two domed cakes. Plus, slicing off the top enables you to chow down practice quality control on your cakes, so you will know if it is celebration worthy without leaving a tell-tale hunk missing from the finished cake.
Cakes are stacked with the bottom layer being top-side-up and the top layer being top-side-down, like a cake sandwich. Depending on how high the mounds of your domes are, you might have only a very small part of each cake meeting in the middle if you stack them without levelling, leaving a gap around the edges of your cake that will have to be filled in with frosting. If you go that route, you’ll have an unstable cake and will probably have frosting oozing out between your layers, which isn’t a great look. So unless you use Magi-cake strips or similar on your pans and have fairly flat cakes to begin with, I’d really suggest levelling them before stacking and frosting the cake.
Here’s an example of what you don’t want. Although the top cake isn’t top-side-down, which would have made the gap ridiculous, you can see that there is still a big gap between the sides, which makes for too much frosting around the edges and not enough in the middle.
Compare that to this cake I made, which I leveled first. It is perfectly flat after stacking and I used the same amount of frosting over the whole surface of the bottom cake.
This shows the inside after cutting. Although the photo is a hot mess because some very hungry people attacked it with a knife and I took it in bad lighting, the even layers are still more attractive to cut into than the mounded cake in the first photo.
All that to preface the video, in which I’ll demonstrate how I level a cake. This tutorial on levelling is the shortest video in the series, so it feels a little funny to give it its own blog and it’s own separate video, but the next is long enough without this one being included, so today is a short and sweet video tutorial day. Enjoy!
P.S. Thank you to everyone who has me in a reader for bearing with me overloading your readers while I updated my 2009 recipes to put the pictures back after they disappeared! As of today, I’m done updating all those old posts (as far as I can tell)! If you ever find any recipes or posts missing pictures, please let me know. Thanks again!
I made a thanksgiving resolution after Thanksgiving last year to find something to be thankful for every day until next Thanksgiving. Every Thursday, I usually recount what was thankful for every day of the past week, but I’m doing something a little different this week, focusing on a subject and fleshing it out, exploring it to see all the ways I can be thankful for it.
I got a truly wonderful phone message early in the week that gave me the warm gooey’s, and it got me thinking about how love can be felt with all senses, and not just as an emotion. Have you ever thought about that? I bet if you start to, you will think of all the ways you have ever seen it, felt it, smelled it, tasted it, and even heard it.
This message from my Aunt Ruby made me realize that I had just heard love coming through the phone at me and I started thinking about other ways I hear love. So this week, here are seven ways I am thankful for the sound of love.
(Sorry about the speaker buzzing-it happened b/c of the phone’s signal interacting with my camera.)
Aunt Ruby is my Dad’s sister, so she knows how much I help him because of his stroke. Although I don’t do it to garner praise, nor am I doing the cupcake fundraiser for my sister for that reason, it was so nice to get such a warm, loving message of thanks. I usually can not accept thanks or compliments and throw them back at the person, making light of them and belittling myself because I do not feel worthy. So I was thankful for this message because I didn’t have the option of throwing it back at her since I wasn’t speaking to her in person, and I could just absorb her words and take them into my heart. I need to work on being able to accept nice things people say to me, because taking her words in felt so good.
***
The sound of Jessie’s love for me is the quick scamper of toenails across the linoleum floor in the kitchen as she runs to the door to greet me when I get home. It’s the sound of her quick, happy panting and the sound of her leg thumping as I scratch her belly. But when her friend, Doc, is over, the sound of doggie love gets much louder:
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The sound of my mother’s love for me is probably different than most. It doesn’t include her saying the words, “I love you,” because she has never said them. But she doesn’t have to for me to know that she loves me deeply. Her love shows best in her actions, how she has always taken care of me, even as an adult when she stayed with me every day I was in the hospital and nursed me back to health (that story is here), but I do hear it when she asks me for every detail of how I made a dessert that she is raving over, and when she compliments an outfit I’m wearing. It’s the sound of her humongous laugh at something funny I’ve said. Maybe that sounds strange because that wouldn’t necessarily imply love for most people, but I know it’s how she tells me she loves me and it’s good enough for me.
***
The sound of my father’s love is funny too, because he will repeat “I love you” if I say it to him, but in my family those are strange words so more often, the sound of his love is him offering me something of his, like a plate he had with a poem about a daughter on it (I have it on display in my office now), or him trying to push money off on me to pay me for cutting his hair, etc. I guess I might also be thankful for the sound of his love because it usually means I’m getting some money. ;)
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The sound of love for God is one of my favorites, because to me it is the sound of His children singing praises to him, and I can not think of a sound I find more beautiful. I can’t imagine how amazing the sound will be when we are in heaven singing with the angels in chorus when it is so lovely here on Earth!
The following song is a favorite hymn of mine, which is based off of God’s greatest commands to love Him with all our heart, soul, and mind, and to also love one another as we love him (There’s that “love” word again, see how this is all intertwined?). It is sung like a round, but each vocal section has different words. The beauty of it grows as the bass joins the altos, then the tenors chime in, and finally it climaxes into an orchestra of voices when the sopranos join in.
I kind of think that while this song is certainly is a good example of the sound of our love for God, it is also the sound of God’s love for us because when we sing it, we are taking the Word he has given us and using our voices to make it not only audible, but beautiful.
Alto: Love one another, for love is of God. He who loves is born of God; And knows God. He who does not love, does not know God, For God is love, God is love, God is love.
Bass: Love bears all things, Believes all things, Love hopes all things, Endures all things.
Tenor: God is love, God is love, God is love. God is love, God is love, God is love. God is love, God is love, God is love, God is love, God is love, God is love.
Soprano: Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, With all thy soul, all thy strength, All thy mind. Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, For God is love, God is love, God is love.
***
And this. This is the first reason I had for considering the sound of love. My husband plays the guitar almost every day and one day I asked, “Do you think you’ll ever write a song for me?” Well, you guys know my husband is nearly infallible in my eyes, but a romantic he is not, and he said, “I never thought about it before.” (He also proposed without a ring and covered in drywall dust, but that doesn’t change the way I feel about him!) But a couple months later, he presented me with this. So, you see, he may not be a natural romantic but he is very sweet and thoughtful and caring and this is the sound of his feelings for me, the sound of his love. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
*Sol Naciente means Rising Sun in Spanish
Can you think of a “sound of love” that you are thankful to have in your life?
Our friends Joe and Marissa (of the “good peas” fame) invited us to lunch after church one day a million years ago, and she served a roast along with many delightful sides. I only took a small portion of the roast ,being much more interested in the salad, her mashed potato casserole, and butternut squash bread, but once I took a bite, I was going back for more. I’m not much of a meat eater, so when I found her roast irresistible, I asked her what her secret was.
“Banana Peppers.”
“Banana peppers?” I repeated, surprised. “What else did you use?”
“That’s it. I just poured a jar of banana peppers over the roast in the crockpot. The acid from the brine really helps tenderize the meat.”
This was so simple, I had to try it at home. I’m just surprised it took me so long! But I’ve made it twice in the past month, to make up for lost time. :)
I adore the salty, piquant flavor the banana peppers & juice impart to the beef, and it really is melt-in-your mouth tender after roasting all day in the slow cooker. And talk about easy! Although Teri taught me to sear the outside of a roast before sticking it in the crockpot, I didn’t even do that. Easy peasy & delicious…squeezy?
I know this combo sounds a bit odd, but you’ve got to try it to believe it! It goes really well with mashed potatoes topped with a pat of butter and garlic salt, as I discovered after taking this picture. :)
