American Baker in Germany

On to birthday party number 2. We always have two parties every year because my husband has a large family and everyone at one party would just be too much. This year, my daughter decided to take advantage of the fact that she gets two parties every year to request a completely different theme for her family party. She wants Frozen. Particularly Elsa. The older sister with the blond hair. Just like her. Okay. The inside she wanted the same, though. Chocolate funfetti checkerboard. But I was able to talk her into a one tier cake. I had looked at a lot of pictures on Pinterest and my favorite one had not just white snowflakes on it, but white and blue daisies. Who comes up with this stuff? That's brilliant! That's what I wanted to do for my daughter's cake. However, with all the funfetti I've been making lately, I ran out of my good sprinkles. I decided to just try it with dollar store sprinkles just to see if it would work. I tried it. And the only color that showe...

This post was not sponsored or affiliated with LOL Surprise! All images and logos used with permission. Since I bake cakes, my daughter has learned that she can make any request, and I'll try to fulfill it if I can. Consequently, she can be very specific about what she wants for her birthday cakes. This year, she told me she wants a chocolate funfetti checkerboard cake. What topic? Her favorite things of all time: LOL Surprise dolls. To make a checkerboard cake, you have to have at least 3 layers, 4 is better, so to avoid making the cake really really tall, I cut each layer in half to make it half the height I normally would. With all those layers, I decided to make Swiss meringue buttercream to fill it with instead of American buttercream to keep it from being too sweet and just make it more pleasant to eat. In case you don't know how to make a checkerboard cake, you measure your round cake and divide it by 3. This will be the diameter of your smallest circle in the middle...

This cake didn't quite end up how originally planned. I was going to use the candy canes in the peppermint chocolate Christmas cake, but the candy canes were strawberry flavored. I was also going to cover it in fondant and really decorate it, but I got the message from those it was meant for that they weren't concerned about it, so I finally decided to save myself the work. The consensus was also that they wanted strawberry buttercream, so I decided to use the candy canes on this cake. I really wanted to make a checkerboard pattern inside, which I had never made before. So I started out with vanilla cake baked in layer pans. Two layers were left white and two were colored red and green. I filled the pans all the way to the brim in the hopes that these very shallow pans would yield a slightly deeper cake. Totally backfired. I put enough batter for 8 cupcakes (according to my cupcake scoop), but enough for 6 would have been plenty.  I leveled the cakes, wrapped them ...