cake is delicious

Last night the regular refs returned to the NFL, and the NFL Network opened its broadcast with this:

"We here at the NFL network are thrilled to bring you television history tonight. This will be the first time ever in any sport on any level that a crowd will give a standing ovation to referee before kickoff, after which it is expected it to take all of about ten minutes for the same fans to call those same refs a bunch of bums, thus returning order to our sports world. Yes, zebragate is over."

Zebra-gate?  Too funny.  Anyway, if you'd like to think that the cake I baked this week was to celebrate the end of zebra-gate rather than the season premiere of New Girl, that's totally fine with me.  Either way, on Tuesday I had friends over to watch the season premiere(S! - two episodes!) of New Girl, and naturally, I decided I had to make something delicious to celebrate.

I got this beautiful cake stand and cover as a wedding gift, and sadly in the past 6 months I haven't found a reason to use it (although it is on display in our dining room!).

So I decided to bake a New Girl premiere party CAKE.  I decided to attempt Chocolate Buttermilk Cake from this book.

Always good to get some use out of that beautiful Kitchenaid! It was my first time making a multi-layered cake, so I was pretty nervous.  I think it went pretty well.  The instructions said to line the pans with wax paper, but I wasn't sure if I should cut it down to the size of the pan or let there be edges.  I let there be edges, but it messed up the shape of the cake a little bit.

Mmmm chocolatey! The instructions said bake 30-35 minutes, and I baked the cakes for 33 minutes, which may have been a liiiitttle too long.  The cake was by no means burnt, but it was a little drier than I would have liked.

I let the cakes cool while I went to spin class, because I had been warned that they might collapse when stacked if I didn't cool them properly.

When I got home, it was time to stack and ice!  Since it was my first time baking a multi-layered cake, I decided to skip homemade icing and just get store bought stuff.

And here we have it, my very first multi-layered cake, frosted and ready to go!

With the cover, of COURSE :-)

We cut the cake between the first and second episodes.

Demolished! (at least half of it):

Everyone seemed to enjoy it (even if it was slightly drier than I would have liked).  And there you have my very first cake!  Now I just need more excuses to bake cakes (and people to eat them, because I have too much leftover cake in my house right now!).