My friend’s wedding is coming up this weekend, so the cakes were baked last week and are happily camping in the freezer, wrapped in plastic and tinfoil, awaiting transport to Vancouver in a few days. Baking the cakes was something I was a little worried about, despite the relative success of the trial run – would they bake evenly, would I have enough batter, would they taste good enough? Turns out all my fears were totally unfounded: the cakes turned out perfectly. They baked in flat, even layers (thanks so the wet towel/cake diaper trick) and they all baked in exactly 50 minutes, no matter which pan size. Even the big 10-inch baked evenly all the way to the middle without a heating core or anything.Remember the confidence I had in my math skillz when I calculated how much batter I would need and how I would need to scale the recipe? I was fairly sure that I would end up with just shy of the right amount of batter, but I got that part totally wrong: I ended up with about 2 cups of extra batter, which is definitely better than 2 cups too little! This meant that I got to use the extra batter to make these sweet little shell-cakes:I made one-and-a half times the recipe below and ended up with about 16 1/2 cups of batter, enough for two 10-inch, two 8-inch, and two 6-inch rounds, each 1 1/2 inches high when baked, plus a bunch of little shell cakes 😉 I mixed the batter in three batches (a half recipe each), then mixed them all together in one big bowl to make sure the batter was uniform. Some of the batter sat for quite a while because I could only bake two cakes at once, and I was concerned that the baking powder and baking soda would lose their leavening power before they hit the oven, but it didn’t seem to make any difference 🙂 Success!

Update: here’s my tutorial for how to frost and assemble the wedding cake from start to finish.

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