Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Baking Bridesmaid

These past months have been filled with 2nd job getting, 2nd job working...and dialing take out. Needless to say while I have been doing some cooking, the recipes have been repeats and certainly nothing exciting to blog about. With that said I do have one creation worth mentioning if only for the great picture to add to show!

I was recently in a wedding of a really great friend of mine, Molly. With the wedding came a shower, weekend planning sessions and a bachlorette party. Each of these weekends brought on plenty of cooking and eating. The shower was mainly catered by a friend of Molly's and the food was incredible (the same women later did her wedding cake). When it came to the wedding planning weekends the bride herself did alot of the cooking and preparing. Molly and I share alot of the same cooking tastes and techniques so I always love eating with her! For her bachlorette party us girls opted to take her out to a nice restaurant and conclude the night with desert back at her apartment...that's where I came in!

Now the shower was just the previous weekend and as mentioned her friend did an amazing job with the food. Molly's favorite cake is carrot and originally that was what I was planning to bake for the bach. party, however i quickly changed my mind when I tasted the carrot cake cupcakes at the shower. Let's just say no healthy options would possibly come close to that heavenly creation. In keeping with the scandalous nature of the party I thought about attempting a red velvet cake. Just the name conjures up love, lust and lusciousness. Of course knowing that the food and drinks would be flowing I began searching for a low fat version to attempt. (would you expect anything different from me?)

You may recall in my valentine post that I attempted red velvet cupcakes from the weight watchers site...they really weren't my favorite and they hardened rather quickly. I wanted to make the cake the night before the party so it was important to me that it would still be tasty the next day. I turned to my trusty Eating Well site and found Red Velvet Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting!

I was excited to try this because my previous experience with Eating Well proves that the recipes taste anything but healthy. This was fairly simple to make, and the double layers made it appear far more difficult than it actually was. I ended up with alot of extra frosting so I frosted the side of the cake as well. The one comment I have on this one is that the cake did not really rise in the pan at all! When you pour the batter in what you see is what you get, so plan accordingly. It was a bit slimmer than I wanted but everyone thought it turned out great.

Molly is a bit of a cake connoisseur (though you wouldn't know it looking at her!), so I was a bit nervous for her to try it. She claimed to really like it! Although I'm not sure if she meant the taste...or the topper :).