I saw a cake like this on the 'I am Baker' blog (http://iammommy.typepad.com/i_am_baker/) and just had to give it a try. So here we go again!
I started by baking four 8 inch layers of cake, two different flavors. This time I chose chocolate and strawberry, but any flavor combination will work.
Immediately upon taking them out of the oven I removed them from the pans, cut the tops off, and stacked them, cut seams together. Then I put them in the freezer. Hopefully this will help to bind them together. Plus, partially frozen cake is easier to cut. They stayed in the freezer for almost 6 hours.
At this point I got extremely frustrated!! The timing for cutting these cakes was very bad. They were ready to cut right about dinner time. Who wants to worry about mundane details like making dinner when there is a new cake project to try? Besides, didn't I just make dinner yesterday? So...knowing that there might be anarchy if my project interfered with dinner, I had to suck it up and throw something together. My family got a rushed pasta dish and a swift kick out of the kitchen so I could start the real fun.
When I was ready to cut the stripes, I took an 8 inch cardboard round and drew 1 inch circles on it. I used this as a guide to direct my cutting.
Then I started cutting the first circle. I cut around the guide on both cakes, taking care to cut at a 90 degree angle.
After cutting the first circle, I used scissors to cut off the next inch and I continued cutting circles in the cakes until I had cut them all.
You can't see the cuts very well, but here is the chocolate cake with all the circles cut into it.
Next I cut open all of the circles so I could rearrange them. I did this on both cakes.
Then I moved the centers of the cakes to two cake boards and started rearranging them, alternating the layers. I did this until I had two completed cakes with alternating layers.
The layers had to be bound together so they wouldn't fall apart. This is the first time I've used a simple syrup (equal parts of sugar and water boiled then cooled). It's normally used to keep a cake moist. My cakes don't usually need help staying moist. But in this case, the simple syrup helped bind the layers together. So I gave the cake a light coat of simple syrup, then wrapped the sides with parchment paper, taking care to pull the layers tight. I secured the parchment with a towel strip, and returned them to the freezer to set up. I left them in the freezer overnight because I wasn't ready to frost them until the next day. In the morning (a few hours before I was ready to frost them) I moved them to the refrigerator to thaw.
After my frosting was made I did a light coat on the cakes to cover them. It didn't have to be smooth because I knew I'd be covering it up anyway.
Then I began piping the roses around the sides, using a 1M size star tip. Sorry about the sun in this picture. I didn't catch that.
I piped the roses all around the edges like so. They didn't look quite as nice as I would have liked, but for a first attempt, I think it worked well enough. If I didn't like how they looked, I just scraped them off and piped them again.
Finally, I piped roses on the top, and voila! Beautiful. There were a few open spaces along the top that I filled in by just piping a swirl of frosting in the same direction as the corresponding flowers, and it's done. Piece of cake!
So all in all, I think the experiment was a success. It was fun and, at the end of the day, there's always cake.
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