The Cake Mix Doctor

Made this one for a wedding shower at work; it's one I've always wanted to try, but never seemed to find an occasion for.

First, let me say that if you bake layer cakes and you haven't bought yourself some baking strips yet, you should definitely get some. This was my first time using them, and they made the layers come out nice and even, and quite tall. I recommend the ones with the velcro rather than the ones you have to pin together. I ordered mine from Amazon.com: I couldn't find the velcro ones in any of the stores in my area.

With the baking strips, the white cake layers came out nice and fluffy and tall. I had less luck with the frosting: after melting the white chocolate (and definitely use a double boiler - I learned the hard way!), I didn't let it cool down enough, and, when combined with the cream cheese and butter, it was very runny. I ended up putting at least a cup and a half more powdered sugar in there than the recipe called for, in order to thicken it up enough to be spreadable. It tasted good though, even though I'm not really a fan of white chocolate (which is another reason I hadn't made the cake sooner). I made the mistake of not taking the raspberry jam out of the fridge and letting it warm up to room temperature before I tried to spread it on the bottom layer: pretty much impossible to spread with any consistency, so I had to let it sit for awhile until it was managable.

I thought completely covering the top of the cake in raspberries (as in the book) was overkill, so I thought about just making a ring of raspberries on the outside. In the end, I decided to skip the raspberries all together and just sprinkled a ring of white chocolate morsels around the edge on top. I got a lot of compliments on how professional it looked, which was a nice change (decorating is NOT my strong suit).

The cake is delicious: the raspberry jam filling goes very well with the white chocolate frosting, plus, I really like the way the slice looks, with the line of red against the white of the cake, and the even whiter icing. This is a VERY pretty cake: a good one to make for a formal or semi-formal occasion.