The Daily Hailey

Ok, for the record, I definitely had help with this! My sister, Caitlin, is considerably more confident in the kitchen than me, and even she was a little nervous for part of this recipe. Luckily, we had each other, and even my mom for part of it, despite the fact that the cake was for her. Behold!

The recipe can be found here. The icing recipe is attached to the original recipe on the link.

We made the layer cakes the night before. The batter was gorgeous! I believe the recipe says to bake for 25-30 minutes so, coming from a home where the oven is always way hotter than the recipes seem to think, we set the timer for 23 minutes and left it alone. When we checked it, the cakes looked wet and bright white still. So we confidently threw them in for another five minutes. After that, they were still surprisingly white! We were kind of floored, and then really floored when the toothpick test came out clean! The sides had browned beautifully, but the cakes were just stark white. If it isn’t obvious, I usually make cake mix cakes. This is a very new development for me!  We put the layers in the freezer so they would be easy to ice together the next day.

Here’s the scary part. Homemade caramel icing!!! There are easy, four ingredient icing recipes that we had lined up for backup plans, but I was hellbent on making this exact cake and Caity was game. So we put all the SUPER HEALTHY ingredients in my biggest pot (before a stock pot) and stirred and stirred. It was really frustrating at first, since its milk-based, and we had to be extra careful to not scorch anything. Yet, if we kept it on any heat, it would foam up sooo fast! It took a while for it to boil down at all. We kept at it, even though it really just looked like we were stirring milk, foaming up, foaming back down, stirring milk, foaming up, foaming back down. And then all of a sudden, there was a yellow streak in the milk. We thought it was maybe butter that hadn’t stirred it, but the icing progressively got yellower. Light, light yellow, but yellow nonetheless. We were probably already a good half hour into the process and pretty much ready to throw the towel in. And then we tasted it. Expecting a “buttered popcorn” flavor, we were more than thrilled to be greeted by an undeniable buttery caramel! It was still a pretty long job after that but oh so worth it! Once the caramel was at the “soft ball stage” (I definitely looked that up on youtube) we had to pull it off the stove and just stir the crazy out of it for several minutes to get it into an icing texture. I have not worked out my arms that way ever, and my son is like a solid sack of potatoes. Either way, a lot of blood, sweat, and tears (and butter AND Crisco) went into this cake! So worth it, everyone.

Not your average cake. I can vouch.