So it was my Mamma's (that's what I call my Grandma) birthday last Sunday and I was tasked with the usual job of making the birthday cake. I made a vanilla birthday cake with vanilla buttercream and a strawberry jam filling. Since she likes white chocolate I decorated the sides of the cake with Cadbury White Chocolate Fingers- only 4 didn't make it onto the cake and ended up in my belly! Then on the top I piped pink roses as she loves her garden. Here's an explanation of how I did it:
I made the buttercream with 300g of unsalted butter, 420g of icing sugar and 3 tsp of vanilla ESSENCE. I make it in stages by creaming 100g of butter, I take the butter out of the fridge at least an hour before hand so it's soft as this makes mixing it a lot easier. Once I have softened the butter further (by beating it) I add 140g of icing sugar, 1tsp of vanilla essence and cream them together. I repeat this 2 more times so all the ingredients are combined. I find that this recipe and method gives you a lovely creamy and sweet buttercream which holds it's shape well but isn't to powdery.
I sliced the cake in half length ways and filled it with the buttercream and a layer of strawberry jam. I put the strawberry jam (about 4 tbsp) into a bowl and give it a good mix so it spreads onto the buttercream easier. I place the top of the cake back onto the bottom ofthe cake (so the buttercream and jam are sandwiched in the middle) then cover the whole cake in a layer of buttercream. Next, I stick the white chocolate fingers around the outside of the cake then I use a small circular cutter to 'draw out' where my roses will be in the buttercream layer on the top of the cake. Then I pipe the roses onto the top of the cake starting with the one in the middle and work my way outwards. To pipe the roses I use a Wilton 1M swirl nozzle and I find disposable piping bags a great help, particularly when it comes to washing up! As a final finishing touch I used a leave cutter to cut out leaves and placed them at random intervals into the piped roses.
As you can see from the picture I cover my cake drums with a layer of fondant icing. I find this gives the cakes a more professional look and I like to utilise the extra space/fondant as an area for decoration. On this cake I used cutters to imprint flowers into the board and used letter stencils to imprint a a personalised message. This was the final product:
I was very happy with it. On the day half of it was consumed so for the rest of the week my Mamma and Grandpa are eating cake for breakfast, dinner and tea, which they say they are very happy about!
xoxo
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