Hat Trick

I do cakes for love, not money.

I truly, truly respect anyone who does this stuff for a living. I usually take on a project for a friend or family member, get all excited about it, spend countless hours plotting out the details in my head, then inevitably, the cake cracks, the piping bag bursts, the "goldenrod yellow" food coloring is more of a "traffic cone orange," I can't find my leaf tip ANYWHERE and the fondant cracks every time I look at it. In short, I am always up at 3am the day the cake is "due" doing absurd things with duct tape and Ziploc bags.
Which is why this cake was such a wonderful, refreshing surprise. It went...fine.

The hardest part was deciding on the color (lemon yellow is a much closer approximation of its packaging). This is a cake that I think anyone could reproduce with the right tools, a little patience, and a handful of YouTube videos.

Materials

You can pick up all of the equipment listed here at Michael's or your local craft store. I've linked out to Amazon just so you can see what everything looks like.

• Cake turntable or Lazy Susan put on top of a box or a big cake pan or something.
• Icing comb
• Ziploc freezer bags, any size larger than the snack version*
• Cake pans: ideally, two 8-inch round pans, 1 12-inch round pan, and an oven-safe bowl with a diameter of 8 inches at the rim.** 
• Cake plate or 12 to 14 inch round cake board
• 1 8-inch round cake board
• 1 6 inch round cake board
• Icing tip 104
• Piping bags
• Food coloring (your choice-I used leaf green, lemon yellow, and sky blue)
• 2 large batches of buttercream frosting (you can make whatever you like, you'll just need a LOT of it. Like, 4 pounds. I used the same recipe as my Cupcakeasaurus, just double it)

Method

• Bake your cakes in the pans or sizes indicated. You can use any recipes you like; for this cake, I used an entire recipe Kentucky bourbon butter cake for the 12-inch layer (the "brim" of the hat) and a 2 chocolate box mixes (gasp!***) for the 8-inch layers (which, when stacked, make up the "crown").
• Now it gets fun! Put your 12-inch cake on the cake plate. If the top is "domed," level it off with a bread or cake knife or even some dental floss! (If you have NO IDEA what I am talking about, watch the video.)

• Give it a nice crumb coat (that's just a thin layer of frosting over the whole thing-don't worry about the cake showing through, you're going to add so many ruffles to this thing!)
• Tint 1 whole batch of buttercream frosting the "base" color (lemon yellow, in this case)
• Fit a large piping or freezer bag with the 104 icing tip and fill 'er up with yellow frosting. (For more than you ever wanted to know about piping bags, watch the video.)

• Starting at the bottom of the layer and working in concentric circles, make ruffles using the method in this video until there's roughly an 8-inch circle of unadorned cake on top.

• Stick the whole thing in the fridge.
• Stack, fill, and crumb coat your 2 8-inch layers on the 8-inch cake board using untinted frosting and/or filling of your choice.**** 
• Put the cake on the turntable, if you haven't already.
• Place a 6-inch cake board on top of the 8-inch layers.
• Place the bowl-shaped cake flat-side down on the cake board.
• Do a crumb coat.
• Using the yellow icing, generously frost the assembled "crown" of the cake. It's doesn't have to be perfect, but it should be thick.
• Holding the icing comb perpendicular to the cake, "drag" the teeth through the frosting, while slowly turning the turntable. You'll need to wipe off the comb fairly regularly, and it might take a few tries to get the hang of it, but eventually, it should look like a nice striped texture.
• Put this cake in the fridge.
• While both cakes are chilling, grab your untinted icing and divide it into 3 parts. Tint one part green (for the leaves), one part whatever color you want the ribbon to be (I did sky blue), and either leave one part the untinted color (for the flowers) or color it however you like.
• Take the cakes out of the fridge and gently put the "crown" of the cake on top of the "brim." Bad things can happen during this process. Just go slow, and remember that you can always fix whatever you mess up.It's only frosting.
• Using whatever is left in your yellow piping bag, add a row or two of ruffles around the base of the crown part of the cake, just to make the "hat" look seamless.
• Using an icing tip or just a Ziploc bag with the corner clipped off, create a "band" around the base crown of the cake (mine is sky blue, and was done with a large petal tip, because that's what I had).
• Watch this video, and then create your choice of flowers.

• Watch this video, and add the leaves.

• Add any additional ribbon "streamers."
• Pour yourself a glass of wine - you've earned it! AND YOU'RE DONE!

* I say this as a brand name because in this case, it matters. You don't have to get the fancy zipper-topped ones and definitely DO NOT get the pleated bottom ones. The good old-fashioned, square baggie will work fine, but it must be strong, or bad things WILL happen.
**You can size up or down, just do so proportionally, and if all you have are square or rectangular pans, you can carve out circles of the right sizes - what happens to all those lovely cake scraps is your little secret.
***Box cake mixes, especially chocolate, are not bad, when you doctor them appropriately. I always add a Starbuck's Italian Roast Via to chocolate cake and brownie mixes. It really brings out the chocolate.
****I added a few tablespoons of cocoa and a packet of Via to some of the basic buttercream and used it to fill and crumb coat this part of the cake. Yummy!