Smitten Kitchen’s wedding cake project was an invaluable aid when I was planning and executing my brother’s wedding cake earlier this year. I had never made a tiered cake before, and Smitten Kitchen was a great source of information for recipes and construction tips.

I used two of the recipes from Smitten Kitchen – the vanilla buttermilk cake for the top tier, and the chocolate butter cake for the bottom tier.

The vanilla buttermilk cake was filled with mango curd, made from canned mango, and the chocolate cake with a chocolate ganache, with Frangelico added to the ganache rather than brandy. Then, after the tiers were stacked together, supported with thick wooden skewers and a cake board, the whole concoction was iced with swiss buttercream icing.

These cake recipes are seriously fantastic – they’re dense, moist and taste amazing. The method of freezing the cake layers, individually wrapped in plastic, for a week prior to decorating the cake works so wonderfully that I don’t think I’ll ever make a celebration cake any other way.

I used the chocolate butter cake recipe to make a cake for my father-in-law’s birthday a few weeks later, using the chocolate ganache to ice the cake (much less forgiving of a clumsy hand than buttercream), and a caramel filling in between each of the layers.