Barefoot Contessa's Fourth of July Cake

As promised, here is the recipe for the cake I made Saturday. It was the second time I made it, and since I was feeling cocky, I mean confident, I ignored some of the more ridiculous instructions requiring that ingredients be room temperature and that the butter be unsalted. What-EVER! Who has time to be so rigid? So I made my recipe card to reflect the technical changes that I did make, one of them being to reduce the salt since I did not use unsalted butter. Also, I actually made this into a layer cake so I doubled all the cake ingredients (although not on the recipe card). I do not want to ever see the calorie count for this. Can you imagine? I used a dozen eggs, six cups of sugar, two and a half pounds of butter, one and a half pounds of cream cheese, etc. We should just call it Heart Attack Cake and be done with it. Except that it's not my cake to name. And I prefer to go with denial when eating dessert. Always.

So here's some of what I did. The first pound of butter, the 6 cups of sugar, dozen eggs, etc., would not all fit in my mixer at the same time so I had to mix up each layer separately. Because the first layer I made had to sit while I mixed up the second batch, they went into the oven looking a little different. The first batch is on the left and the second batch is on the right.

Pretty noticeable, isn't it? Here's what they looked like out of the oven. I was surprised to see that they still looked different. The taste was the same though, so no worries.

Since I made it into a layer cake, the parchment paper I put underneath was a necessity. They allowed me to lift the cake out of the pan so Peanut Head could do this.

I wanted the cake to have clean edges and both layers needed to be uniform, because even though I'm a rebel with recipe instructions, I'm still pretty anal myself. This next picture is some of what was cut off. The scraps disappeared pretty quickly and they were delicious.

I was a chicken when it came to putting the top layer on so Peanut Head helped out. He got the top layer close and said "I want it to be right about here and . . . SLAM (top layer connects perfectly with bottom layer!) "I'll just do it before I think too much about it." Normally I don't like to compliment him too much because he has an overabundance of confidence as it is, but I just had to after this slick move. This was his slam dunk . . . there was no readjusting or sliding the cake around, he hit it right on.

And here is the completed cake. It was sooooo hard not to dig in right away. The wait was worth it though.

Oh man, I just realized that this post follows my work out recommendations. This cake is going to shred all my hard work. Oh, the irony.