A Giant Cupcake Cake.

Good news! I was approached about baking for a wedding. Seems like a mildly daunting task, but I'm pretty awesome and confident with my baking so I'm pretty sure I can handle it. Originally (meaning before today), I thought it was going to be 100 cupcakes and a giant cupcake cake. So I did a practice cake (autumnal theme). I will no longer be doing the giant cupcake cake, but for a first run, I don't think I did too shabby of a job. I also figured out some good tricks with using the Wilton Giant Cupcake pan.

1) First things first, there are some blogs that I read that said you could do this cake with 6 cups of batter. Well, that my friends, is bullshit. You need at least 8. If you're doing this from boxed mixes, you'll need two boxes. You'll use 75% of the batter in the giant pan and you'll have enough batter left to make a dozen cupcakes.

2) To get a cake that looks nice like the one in the above picture, you'll need handy carving skills. You'll need to cut away some of the swirl for the top half to make it look proportionate to the bottom part.

3) And to prevent disasters and increase portability, I found it is best to cut a dome in the bottom part of the swirl to make it fit on top of the bottom cake, like a little hat. You'll need about a cup of a really, really thick basic butter cream to cement the two together.

All up, my butter cream was 1 lb of butter, 2.5 pounds of sugar, and a little bit of milk. (This will also ensure that you've got enough to frost the dozen cupcakes).

The results: (pardon my table, I like movies):

Also, that frosting isn't chocolate, it's food coloring.