Ok, so clearly, I am not expert at this. If I were you, I might be laughing, a tiny, tiny bit, that I'd post a how-to on making a cake, when my cake ended up like that. But, I learned a lot during this process, and I do want to share that, for any cake building exercise your future may hold. And, I thought the cakes themselves were super delicious, so I want to share the recipes we used for both the cake and egg free cupcakes.

But let's start with the Empire State Building. I can't remember the last time I made a cake - of any stature - that didn't have "cup" affixed to its name, so this was truly starting from scratch. I searched online for fellow Empire State Building cake makers, but it doesn't seem to be that popular. The only one I found was a wedding cake, the likes of which I couldn't hope to rival. But I figured that the cake itself wasn't' terribly complicated, once I decided to leave out sculptural elements. It was just a bunch of stacked cakes. So I needed to figure out if there was anything special about stacking cakes, other than, you know, stacking them.

There is. Cake is heavy and soft, so you need a bunch of support if you want to build one up.

I read lots and lots of blog posts about cake building, and learned my options. You need two types of support: vertical posts, which can be wooden pegs or heavy duty straws, and horizontal layers made of sturdy coated cardboard, foam core or even thin wood. I went with a wooden dowel I got at our hardware store, untreated and so presumably food-safe, and a piece of white foam core for the horizonatal layers. You'll need to cut both of those things to size, and I recommend a hacksaw for the dowel and a serrated knife for the foam core. For fun, you can try cutting foam core with scissors, tear out some of your hair, and then reach for the serrated knife.

But let's back up a moment.

First, you have to start with even layers. You can see, both here and in the final result, that I didn't nail the even layers thing. But I gave it my all. I both sliced off the rounded tops of cakes, and used a bakers trick of wrapping a soaking wet towel strip around the cake pan and securing with a safety pin.

This worked, in that I got some lovely, very flat layers out of it, but the towel also dried out both times I used it and even started to smell a bit scorched, which is way, way outside of my fire safety comfort zone. I just baked the rest of the cakes normally and sliced off the tops with a serrated knife. 

Then it was construction time.

1. Crumb coat your first layer. You can see tha my "first" layer is actually two thin cakes stacked together, acting as layer one. Crumb coating was a new term for me, but it just means a first layer of frosting that you let harden before you go back with more frosting. That first frosting traps all the crumbs, so your second frosting layer looks great. Super simple.

2. Once you have your first layer set, you need to determine the size of your second layer. Take your second layer and trace it onto a piece of foam core. It helps to not be working with frosted cake while you're tracing, which is why I frosted my layers only once I'd stacked them.

3. Place your foam square on your cake and mark where your posts will go - the posts have to fall within this foam core layer, for support.

4. Remove your foam core and insert your dowel or straw, mark exactly the height of the cake, remove, cut to size and re-insert. Then, replace your foam core, add a thin layer of frosting to both cover and adhere your next layer, and repeat steps 1-4 with your next cake layer.

Here's a little cross-cut of the cake after we've started to cut into it. you can see one of the support posts - once you start cutting, they're really visible and easy to remove, though I had fears that they wouldn't be. Oh, and why are some of my layers moldy green? I was going for purple, as requested by the birthday girl. Though the batter was definitely purple, the finished product was this. Ah well. She hasn't noticed.

For recipes, quickly, we used two different vanilla vanilla recipes. One for the cake, adapted from The Cupcake Project and adapted fro cakes here, resulted in a dense, delicious, not-too-sweet cake. Once paired with frosting, the whole thing is pretty sweet, but on its own, it's just yummy. I quadrupled this recipe and skipped the vanilla bean, because they're expensive and the cake was for children. The quadrupling turned out fine, but beware the amount of cake you're actually trying to bake - too much in the pan - I'd say anymore than halfway up the cake pan - and the cake will take far, far too long. Apportion your batter into small cake sizes for optimal baking.

For the cupcakes we used this super easy, yummy, and light egg-free recipe from Eggless Cooking. And for both, we adapted a regular frosting recipe with sour cream instead of milk to ease up on the sweetness a tad. All in all,  yummy yummy.

If you have any questions on the cake saga - and there were some dramatic moments - feel free to ask. I feel really empowered on cake baking now, even if I have absolutely no desire to make another one anytime soon. Have a great day!