Christmas Cake and our Kitchen - Dear Lillie Studio

Good morning! I hope you all have had a lovely weekend so far. Today I wanted to share a few photos of our kitchen and an easy little Christmas cake we made. We’ve actually made two very similar versions of this cake in the last week or so – haha! This is a dessert all four of us love – particularly my girls. It is their favorite! They request some version of this for each of their birthday’s pretty much every year.

First here are some pictures of our kitchen. I didn’t do much as far as Christmas decor in here but I did add some wreaths to the backs of our bar stools. I’ve had those wreaths since before I had Lillie and they have been used in five different houses over the years – haha! And then I also made a wreath that is over to the right of the stove. You can read more about that here.

Then I just cut some greenery from our yard and added in some simple white roses and that was it!

For the cake make your favorite yellow cake. Although we’ve made several from scratch I have to admit our favorite is yellow cake is actually from a mix – the Betty Crocker Super Moist yellow cake mix. For this version we used two boxes and then filled three 8″ round cake pans and used the extra to make six little cupcakes that we snacked on ! Once the three cakes were cooled I made the icing. My favorite icing is from the back of the Hersheys’ cocoa powder box except we often double it so we can use it between the layers so the numbers we are sharing below are the doubled version which is plenty for this cake:

1 cup (2 sticks) of butter or margerine

1 1/3 cup Hershey’s cocoa powder

6 cups powdered sugar

2/3 cup milk (I actually don’t always end up using all the milk)

2 tsp vanilla extract

Melt the butter. Stir in cocoa. Alternately add powdered sugar and milk and beat on medium speed. Add more milk if needed (I don’t usually use even close to the amount of milk in the recipe). Stir in Vanilla. Makes about 4 cups of frosting.

Once you’ve made the frosting then it’s time to build your cake. I start with one layer and then trim off the top of it a bit so it’s pretty flat. Then I spread on a thick layer of frosting and do this with each layer. Then once the third layer is on I frost the top and the sides. I don’t trim that top layer down at all – I let that one stay a little rounded on top. Then I use the extra icing a dab a little bit of it onto the backside of a these Pepperidge Farm Pirouettes (I always use the hazelnut ones) and stick them around the cake. I have to trim them down a bit to the desired height but that’s pretty easy. I just use a sharp knife and they cut easily. I usually use two tins of them but this time there were so many broken ones in one of the tins that I ended up needing a third. And then I usually like to shave a Hershey bar into little curls and sprinkle that on top but I didn’t have a Hershey bar this time so I just sprinkled on some chocolate chunks to add that last little touch.

We’ve been making this style cake for years. In fact here are some pictures of a double layer (instead of triple, so it’s a bit shorter) version I made 8 1/2 years ago for Lola’s first birthday!