sarah's housewarming cake

thursday night we had a nice little get-together to celebrate my sister-in-law's sister's new apartment! sarah's been living in arizona for the last year and a half i think. maybe more. and she has the greatest skin in the world! (that has nothing to do with her moving into an apartment, but she really has beautifully milky white clear skin. i jealous.) she has been living with her sister, and justin (my bro-in-law), and niece. they are planning on moving into army life, so sarah's getting her own apartment could not have happened at a better time.
i thoroughly enjoyed making sarah's cake. especially since it is the first real cake i have made since living in this apartment. i actually really hate getting the cakes to come out of the baking pans, and then i really really hate frosting the cakes and trying not to pick up crumbs along the way. it's stressful. but fortunately the cakes slid out of the baking pans, and i got a great recipe for vanilla buttercream off of the foodnetwork website, which made frosting shockingly quite easy. and for the most part, i would say that the frosting tasted pretty good too. but i'm not entirely sure cause after all the frosting making and spreading, i had no desire to actually eat any cake once everything was all said and done.



sarah likes cats (she has great skin. but obviously she's crazy. i don't like cats.) she also likes to read and drink tea. her favorite color is red, which made me start sweating immediately when i asked her for her favorite color- cause mixing fondant to be red really sucks. like really sucks. but it turned out alright.



i just did a buttercream icing around the whole cake, and added all my handmade fondant pieces afterwards. i did the circles on the side of the cake, to tie in the motif on the 'rug' i made. but i mostly did it to cover the unevenness of the icing. i also did a 'shag carpetting' on top of the cake to really make it look like an apartment, AND to cover the unevenness of the icing on the top of the cake.



and here is the buttercream recipe i used that worked out pretty great:
3 cups confectioners' sugar
1 cup butter
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 to 2 tablespoons whipping cream

i added quite a bit more whipping cream to make it more spreadable. but i also added some already-brewed (and therefore not hot) coffee to break some of the serious sweetness of this icing. next time i will probably add even more coffee (this time i put in about a tsp of the good stuff. a serious tbsp or more will probably be better. i'll let you know though.)

(i know the label says 'cupcakes' even though this was clearly not a post about cupcakes. but i'm not making another new label!