Homemade Smash Cake … Semi Fail

For some reason I always have an overly confident approach when it comes to crafts/recipes/etc that I see on Pinterest or my favorite blogs. Take this one for example … Mini Cakes DIY. Baking a cake in a tin can … sounds easy enough right? Wrong. I followed this recipe to a T and my cakes did not come out looking as pretty as hers. The only thing I changed was I used different cakes; yellow cake, chocolate cake and strawberry cake (hoping to make it extra pretty). Fail. I could hardly get my cakes to come out of the can, they baked with a hollow hole and I had to double the time because they were not baking properly. After almost an hour in the oven, I finally said F it and took them out (surprisingly they were done). I let them cool in the can for 40 minutes and then took them out. All were good except the strawberry, almost all my layers crumbled and disintegrated. Who knew cake could do that.

I finally collected all the good layers and started the frosting. What. A. Nightmare. I ended up losing one stack in an avalanche, leaving me with 2 lonely cake stacks. I don’t like even numbers and there is just something about that odd number that really gets me. I decided to do the third stack in a square and it was a lot easier. I was finally confident in how my cakes looked, and then came the car ride. We literally pulled into the location and there was a huge dip in the road and 2 of them slid apart. At that point I figured Henry could just eat cakes that were already smashed. Luckily our photographer was able to hold and fix the cakes and make them look oh so pretty. One of the fellow moms in my mommy group took our photos and she did an incredible job and made the process so fun (even though it was only 10am and we were all sweating bullets). See her beautiful pictures and read her fun blog over at Love, Joleen Photography. Below are a few teasers and I cannot wait to see the rest!