Old-Fashioned Berry Layer Cake (Baking Handbook)

Difficulty: Easy!

Yeah! I just finished baking my first recipe out of the Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook. It just happened to be the recipe on the front cover of the book! Last night I asked the girls to look through the cake section of the book and pick out a cake to make Daddy for his birthday today. They picked out 2 cakes and this one looked the easiest. I am not a baker, I open a box, add the ingredients and bake. That is baking to me or swinging by Hy-Vee and picking up something from the bakery.

When I created my 40-before-40 things to do before I turned 40, I had decided that a great challenge would be to bake my way through the Baking Handbook. What a great day to start! Here's what the cake should look like:

Here the cakes are just out of the oven & cooling on the rack:

Here is my cake....I didn't have mint leaves to put on top of the cake.

Not bad, huh? It was really yummy!