Two Church Anniversary Cakes

My work schedule has been wonky as of late. I've been training to bake at 3 in the morning then napping, then working on cakes, then napping again, then more 3am work. It's been tough, but I managed to make these two half sheet cakes over the course of 2 days, and I'm quite proud of them. One was chocolate and the other was yellow cake. They both had my yummy  homemade butter-vanilla buttercream slathered upon them.












Chocolate cakes are very crumb-y so a crumb coat is VERY necessary. As you can see above, my white icing has been infiltrated by evil little crumbs. It's also good to have a little crumb bowl around if you're using the spatula method (as opposed to the large pastry bag method) of spreading buttercream onto a cake so you don't contaminate the whole batch of icing.

 After cooling the cake for about 15-20 minutes in the fridge, I put my second coat on. Since I don't have one of those little scraper things, I used what I had: a fondant smoother. It actually works pretty well!

This is my finished product complete with double border and roses.


This is the yellow cake. I didn't need a crumb coat with that one, but if you look closely you can see a few rogue crumbs that broke loose... hmph. But it's all good. In the grand scheme of things, I like how it turned out.