The Baby Naming Cake

I am a little confused because I thought I had posted a few weeks ago about my new niece, Magdalena Rose, who was born on July 11th and is probably the most adorable thing in the world, with the possible exception of myself as a baby, but I guess I was wrong.

Anyway, my brother and sister-in-law are now the proud parents of the aforementioned child and had a baby naming celebration today to, well, celebrate. I made the cake (shocker). This was a two-fold cake. On one hand, it was supposed to be a lovely cake for baby Maggie, on the other hand, a test run for the wedding cake I'm making at the end of the month. It ended up very pretty and I learned a lot about egg whites and their reaction to 248 degree sugar syrup. I'm not sure it was my most successful from-scratch baking endeavor, but people seemed to eat it nonetheless and I have had no reports of emergency room visits. I used a recipe for a Victorian sponge cake out of some cookbook that makes me thing I should just use the Paula Dean 1-2-3-4 recipe for everything from now on. It was filled with chocolate Italian Meringue Buttercream which didn't set quite right and frosted with a very interesting frosting recipe that calls for granulated sugar, butter, flour and milk. It also involved my first foray into the world of royal icing, an venture that will not soon be recreated (needless to say there was a lot of swearing in the kitchen on Friday).

Anyway, as I said, it looked pretty: