Italian Wedding Cake

This weekend was my sister’s birthday. I love her with all my heart. I also love cake.

And I really love this Italian Wedding Cake. It is filled with pineapple and pecans, it is sweet and light and delicious. The first time I made this cake was for my 24th birthday. Tiffany and I made an Italian wedding dolphin fish cake

It was fun, goofy and tasted AAA-mazing.

I think the original recipe had coconut in the actually cake. But since I’m not a big fan of the texture of coconut, we dyed it and used it as the fish scales on the frosting.

Now every chance I have an excuse to get special and make Italian Wedding Cake I get excited. I don’t think I really need a special reason to make this cake but it makes me feel better when I am stuffing cake in my face to be able to tell myself I have a good excuse to do so.

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Ingredients

1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup shortening
2 cups sugar
5 eggs, separated
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 teaspoon almond extract(optional)
2 cups flour, sifted
1 cup buttermilk
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon fine salt
1 cup crushed pineapple, drained
1 cup chopped pecans
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Preheat the oven to 350°.

Chop the pecans and drain the pineapple, set aside.

Measure out the buttermilk and add the baking soda and salt, stir to dissolve.

Start by creaming the butter, shortening and sugar together until light and fluffy.

Separate the egg yolks from the egg whites. Set aside the egg whites for later.

Add the egg yolks to the batter along with the vanilla and almond extract.

Beat in the eggs, vanilla and almond extract.

Sift in one cup of flour, mix until just incorporated.

Add the buttermilk, baking soda and salt mixture. Its better to add it slowly as the mixer is running on its lowest speed, but that would have been too hard to take a picture of.

Then sift in the remaining cup of flour and stir.

Add the pecans and pineapple.

Whip the egg whites to stiff peaks.

Gently fold the beaten egg whites. The egg whites are supposed to make the batter lighter, so try not to deflate them too much. I add them in three additions, stirring more gently after each.

Prepare your baking vessel. I sprayed my sheet pan with cooking spray then dusted it with flour.

Transfer the batter and smooth out evenly.

Bake until done. In a normal cake round this should take about 30 minutes, in the sheet pan it took less time. Just test the done-ness but sticking a toothpick into the center. If it comes out clean, then the cake is ready.

This is one of those times when you look over at your mess and think it might not be worth it. But then the smell of the cake baking infiltrates your nostrils while you are doing the mountain of dishes and you realize that it is totally worth it.

Allow the cake to cool before chilling. After I let the cake cool, I stuck it in the freezer for two days. I waited until the day of the birthday celebration to actually make the frosting and put the cake together. I’ll show you how to do that next time when I make the Sweet Almond Swiss Meringue Buttercream.