Ellen is our sister and Monday was her 2 year Wedding Anniversary. Their wedding was a great event and all of the planning and preparations went smoothly except for one thing... the cake. Ellen and Brandon decided that their favorite cake is Yellow cake with chocolate frosting. Simple. Classic. Tasty. Erin insists that this is birthday cake but what you want on your wedding day is what you should get. You would think that this is a very easy thing to find at a bakery but you would be wrong just like we were. We went to over a half dozen bakeries around the Los Angeles area and they all felt that Yellow Cake and White Cake or Vanilla cake was the same thing. After hearing this a lot, we decided that maybe we didn't know something that they did so we scheduled a few tastings or should we say disappointments. Listen up bakeries; the customer is always right. First off a yellow cake should at least be yellow. Its just sad knowing that what you're about to taste and waste calories on is just not what you're looking for. Second, what makes the cake yellow is not food coloring, its egg yolk.
Yolk that adds the richness of flavor and that density that when combined with the sweet vanilla flavor brings you back to your childhood. Is that too much to ask?
We eventually did find a great bakery: Ms. Ruby's Bakery in Inglewood. She apparently specializes in Red Velvet Cake and Fried Chicken but her Yellow Cake is also amazing and the prices were VERY reasonable.
Flash forward 2 years and we're on a Yellow Cake mission again, this time to make it ourselves. We found a great recipe at Smitten Kitchen. Erin would like it noted that Deb at Smitten Kitchen thinks this is birthday cake too but here we turn it into... Anniversary Cake, ta da!
We really liked the use of parchment paper and greasing the pans with Baking Pam. That stuff smells soo good!
Voila! Beautiful!
And then there's the frosting.
We are big fans of this frosting because it's so easy. You put all the ingredients in the food processor and you're done. It's very cool.
These recipes can be found at the link above for Smitten Kitchen. The frosting is the Instant Fudge Frosting. The cake and the frosting taste great with a glass of milk.
Lessons learned: There's no harm is trying to do something better than a box mix. There was no disappointment with this cake. We might try for a more custardy flavor next time though. Maybe we'll add an extra egg yolk...
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