A Graduation Cake
Bubby graduated from High School! I still have to pinch myself to believe it, because it feels like I just dropped him off at preschool. On that day so long ago, I was so nervous about how he would do that I couldn't go home and waited the entire three hours he was there at the nearest café in case they needed me to pick him up. A lifetime ago, when he was 3!
The family was coming to a brunch at our house before the early evening ceremony and we prepared a nice spread including a corn chips with guacamole, a cheese array, pork tenderloin, local asparagus, couscous salad and plenty of beverages. I decorated the house to make it look festive for the graduate and he received lots of gifts of money, a watch, t-shirts and more. The grand finale of the afternoon needed to be a special cake.
I decided to try this recipe from Preppy Kitchen because I wanted a hefty cake in 8-inch pans. I liked how simple it was to put together! I didn't have cake flour at hand, so I made my own using cornstarch.
Usually when recipes have a cinnamon swirl, you put half the batter in the pan, then sprinkle the cinnamon sugar on top, then add the other half of the batter on top. I realize this would have made it difficult to divide the batter evenly into the three pans. I've made this recipe from Sally's Bake Blog before and I remember it being good. In that recipe, you combine the cinnamon sugar with melted butter, which obviously makes it easier to incorporate into the cake batter. But overall Sally's recipe has more butter and more buttermilk and in general I don't like how her cakes always come out too buttery and sometimes dense. I find Preppy Kitchen's cake recipes to consistently yield better results than Sally's. But in the future, I may either add some melted butter to the cinnamon swirl, or try to divide the batter within each pan into a cinnamon swirl "sandwich". Because even though I tried to swirl the cinnamon sugar using a toothpick, it didn't really incorporate and still sat on top, getting crunchy in the oven and yielding a bit of an unsettling bite of cinnamon and crunch, especially after being in the fridge for a few days.
Cinnamon Swirl sitting on top of cake batter
The Cinnamon Swirl doesn't incorporate, even when swirled!
Other than this small quandary the recipe is a breeze to make. The cakes rose to a nice height.
The Snickerdoodle Buttercream that goes along with it is delicious! I rarely get to make a cream cheese frosting because we usually have to travel away with cakes and spend a lot of time in the car with the frosting unrefrigerated. So, I made sure to take advantage of this opportunity. Only glitch with this is the color that results. I wasn't planning to color the buttercream anyway but I wasn't a fan of the yellowish color of this frosting, no doubt from the brown sugar.
I'd ordered this cake topper from Amazon a couple of weeks prior. I briefly toyed with the idea of making a fondant graduation cap and have even purchased the black fondant, but I just had too much to do with other preparations, house cleaning, company arriving and all that goes with such a big event. Then while shopping at Michael's for graduation cap decorations I spotted a "2024" fondant cutter and a graduation cap cookie cutter. I knew immediately what I would do!
The "official" color of Bubby's high school is burgundy and that's the color of his cap and gown. So I decided the fondant graduation caps should be burgundy as well. It was a bit tricky to get the color but I mixed red with black, along with some drops of navy and purple food coloring, and wouldn't you know it I got the exact shade of burgundy I wanted. It was in the stars!
I pressed the "2024" from the same color fondant. This cheap fondant cutter wasn't stamping the first and last number properly. I ended up pressing the fondant into the cutter and molding it with my hand instead of placing the cutter on the fondant and pressing down on it. But at least I got the impression I wanted!
I wanted to liven up the look of the cake a bit, between the dark of the burgundy and the yellowish tinge of the frosting. I decided to go with green, since that's Bubby's favorite color. It's also mine. I spelled out his name in green fondant. I piped some open-tip stars on the sides of the cake and green swirls on top of the cake, and alternated those with Ferrero Rocher chocolates. I did all this the morning of Graduation Day, because I didn't want the fondant decorations to be in the refrigerator for too long before serving the cake.
Snarky-as-usual SIL couldn't refrain from commenting that the cake looked Irish, with the green swirls, even though she knew it wasn't my intention. But then she also said that I had outdone myself with this cake, so I guess her comments evened out.
And the cake was delicious! You just can't go wrong with snickerdoodle.
Overall the graduation events were wonderful. Bubby did very well at the rehearsal and then the family arrived. I had decorated the living room to make him feel special and everything looked so festive, with a banner, stars hanging from the doorway, paper fans, and a table laid out with a "Congratulations" tablecloth and graduation plates and cups. These are the decorations I ordered.
We served "linner" because the ceremony started at 6 pm. We put out guacamole and chips, a cheese and cracker array, couscous salad, local seasonal asparagus, and pork tenderloin with mustard. We offered red and white wines with that. Bubby got some nice gifts too. He was borderline ecstatic!
The ceremony was so moving, especially when the kids walked out on the stage and the parents gave them a 5-minute standing ovation. We were all on such a high!
There was leftover cake for days and I was surprised at how it dried out in the refrigerator. I'd suspected that maybe it was overbaked, and although when we cut into it you couldn't tell, I think I did leave it a bit too long in the oven.
But overall Bubby's graduation cake was part of a super special day!
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