Baked on June 10, 2018 (...while I was still 29...)
Pink Striped Vanilla Cake with Buttercream Flowers
Recipe Sources:
Vanilla Cake, The Scran Line (Nick Makrides)
Wilton American Vanilla Buttercream Frosting recipe
Yes, you read correctly. On my 30th birthday I baked my own birthday cake. But honestly? I wouldn't have had it any other way. It was truly a treat to myself to spend each evening the previous week thinking about the design for this cake and then spending 11 hours on a Saturday baking it. I was so tired from making it that we ended up eating it for breakfast on Sunday instead, but it was 100% worth it!!!
Even before I decided to make this blog an official endeavor, I was trying to challenge myself to learn new baking techniques. One aspect of baking I have always thought was so beautiful is buttercream flowers. I am WAY too chicken to try to pipe flowers directly onto a cake, so I was thrilled to learn from YouTube that one option is to pipe flowers onto wax paper using thick American buttercream, freeze them for a few minutes and then peal and place onto your cake. The outcome is stunning and gives you the freedom to rearrange the flowers if needed while they are still cold enough to handle.
Let's put the "petal" to the metal and get this buttercream flower cake started!
While externally the focus of this cake would be the piped butter cream, I wanted the inside to be a surprise as well. To make this happen, I wanted to create vertical white and pink stripes in the batter. My first step was to make vanilla cake batter, split in two, and dye one portion pink.
In my search through YouTube videos, many "Pride Rainbow" Cake recipe videos used a technique of piling globs of differently colored batter on top of each other that eventually would spread out in the pan into a rainbow pattern. Stealing this idea, my first attempt at this cake was to use this technique with alternating white and pink colored batter. Let's just say that this technique did NOT work for me because I could not get the batter to spread to the edges of the pan without mixing together into a pale pink. This photo is not shown here because it was so disgraceful I didn't even TAKE a photo!
STARTING OVER . . .
My next thought was that batter so thick could potentially hold it's shape while other batter was added around it. I made another batch of batter and then attempted to first put a glob of pink batter in the center, then use a large spoon to add dabs of white batter around this pink blob, and then add dabs of pink batter around the ring of white batter to the edges of the pan. To make for interesting layers to the cake, I reversed the order of the colors in the other round pan, starting with white in the middle. This technique worked much better than my first attempt and into the oven these pans went!
After removing these pans from the oven and cooling, I stacked the layers onto a cake board and frosted with Italian Meringue Buttercream. I had some buttercream leftover, so I dyed it pink and piped small balls around the bottom of the cake.
Speaking of buttercream, it should be noted that there is a significant difference between American and European styles of buttercream. American butter cream is far sweeter and uses a ton of powdered sugar, compared to its European counterparts. When it comes to European style buttercreams, I often opt for the Italian style because I find it much easier to prepare and it is slightly sweeter than the Swiss style. In Italian buttercream, you start whipping your egg whites and then add boiling sugar water to the mix, cooking the egg whites while they whip into peaks. You then add chunks of butter when the mixture is cool to whip into a frosting. In the Swiss style, you cook the egg whites in the double boiler before whipping into the frosting. As someone who has, on multiple occasions, turned the egg-based topping for German Chocolate Cake into scrambled eggs on the stove, you can understand why Swiss buttercream scares me. In addition, many online have mentioned that the Italian style is easier to pipe.
The next step was to create the light and dark pink American buttercream flowers and green leaves to place on top of the cake. To make the roses, I dabbed a blob of frosting onto a large flower nail and placed a square of parchment paper on top to secure to the nail. Then, using a tapered tip attached to a piping bag I first piped a blob of frosting in the middle of the nail, and then added "petals" around the blob. The first ring contained three petals, the next ring with five and the last ring with seven. The thin part of the tapered tip was facing upwards to create thin edges to the petals. On some of the flowers, I added small dots of yellow frosting in the center. I practiced a few other flower variations as well. Note that it was important to use pretty thick American buttercream to ensure that these flowers could hold their shape, even before going into the freezer.
I also wanted to create leaves to distribute among the flowers to break up all the pink colors. To create a two-toned look to these leaves, I first fitted a piping bag with the same tapered tip and fill it on the side with the thin portion of the tip with dark green frosting. The other side was then filled with the lighter green frosting. Next, I piped leaves by using a semi-circle swooping motion with the thin part of the tip staying on the inside. I then popped the flowers and leaves into the freezer for a few minutes to firm up.
It only took a few minutes in the freezer for the flowers and leaves to be firm enough to handle. Pealing away the parchment paper from each, I started to place the flowers onto the top of the cake. After placing all the flowers, I interspersed the leaves among the flowers and made other rearrangements as needed to cover the whole cake.
At this point the cake was done, so the only thing left to do was eat! Cutting into the cake, the striped pink and white layers turned out exactly how I hoped. The lines between the two colors were very well defined.
30 was a good birthday and this cake was part of it. Here's to a fantastic 30th year!