Party Cakes!
This months Daring Bakers challenge was a party cake. I meant to put this up yesterday, but Monday morning will have to do, This is my third challenge, and it went very well. Cake is always welcome in my house, so I ended up making two :D The cake is amazing. Light, fluffy, bright white. We were allowed to take some liberties with the recipe - altering the flavors, but sticking with the general recipe. on my first cake I decided to add blood orange zest to the cake recipe, and I used blood orange juice and zest, and vanilla paste in the Italian buttercream. This made the icing slightly pink, but I decided to not add food coloring to the icing.I realized I have absolutely NO skill with icing cakes. I tired to follow the instructions for icing the cake. I filled each layer with a mix of blackberry preserves and fresh blackberry juice, the layered the icing. when I finished, I was almost out of icing. Parts of the outside did not get a full covering, This dried out part of the cake, Granted - it tasted great, but looked very incomplete.
Once this cake was demolished, I decided to make another. I used everything I learned with the first cake and applied it to the second. First off, I changed the recipe. I made a honey lavender cake with lemon curd filling. This was an interesting experience. I love the smell of lavender, I make honey lemon biscotti, and I use it in some spice blends. for the cake, I ground some lavender with the sugar and added it with the sugar. I didn't use a lot, just enough to barely smell it. The next step was the icing.The Italian buttercream recipe has you whipping the egg whites and sugar before you add the butter. I replaced half of the sugar with my wife's breakfast honey (local farm down the street). I pulverized two tablespoons of lavender blossoms with a teaspoon of sugar and added that during the creaming stage. Once the icing was ready, I dug through the icing colors and pulled out the violet paste. I added the color until I had a nice violet tint. I like the icing color paste - it does not have a flavor that you can taste.
This cake came together much better. Lemon curd and icing in each layer, full coverage on the outside. But I still cannot decorate a cake. I remembered to put down a crumb coat, the I top loaded the cake and worked the icing down the sides. we had full, even coverage on the cake, and the icing was much more balanced then the previous cake. The flavors worked great, we all enjoyed this cake more then the first.This is my favorite cake recipe, we will be making this again :D
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Love that pink buttercream!
Very pretty! Great job!
Cheers,
Rosa
That's a wonderful colour! I would have loved to try the honey-flavoured one!
I'll post up the recipe I used for the icing tonight
You did a wonderful job on your cake. Congratulations!
Natalie @ Gluten A Go Go
Wow - two cakes?! Both are gorgeous! The honey lavender sounds especially intriguing!
Fabulous job! The color of the buttercream is lovely!
your cake looks wonderful! Well done
I love the pretty pink buttercream- Perfect in pink!
xoxo
Gabi
You did a wonderful job on your cake. I love the flavor combination too.
Natalie @ Gluten A Go Go
Way to go with two cakes!!
Both the flavorings sound interesting but I'd lean to the honey and lavender!!
Once I did a really good job getting the icing on! I do find it a challenge.