Birthday! Stripes! A Cake!

Wow, from making a cake to blogging about it in less than two weeks. I really am starting to get on top of this backlog of photos.

I made a cake for a friend's birthday. She had absolutely no special requests. Any flavours. Any cake. Any icing. Any decor. Any anything I wanted. I love these cake requests, but they also scare me. What if I make something that I like but she doesn't?!? Well, my worries were unnecessary, as everyone loved the cake.

STRIPE-TACULAR CHOCOLATE BIRTHDAY EXTRAVAGANZA!

OK, I'll work on the name. But what did it look like, you ask?? The final product was pretty cool:

I decided that chocolate was a pretty safe bet in terms of cake flavour, so I whipped up a two layer mocha chocolate cake. I looked at the baked layers and decided that the cake simply wouldn't be tall enough for my design plans, so I whipped up another two layers. There's something quite wonderful about a cake with four layers of chocolatey goodness inside...

I based my design on a photo of a wedding cake that I saw online. The wedding cake version was three tiers, with all white stripes and didn't have the chocolate glaze dripping all over it. So basically, the photo inspired me to try the horizontal buttercream stripes, but the rest was improvised.

I wanted the stripes to be a variety of colours, but didn't want a rainbow, so I went with three colours, all of similar intensity. Blue, green and purple. There was a moment of indecision where the purple was going to be pink instead, but I stuck to the original idea. It's quite possible that I should have gone with pink though, because by the time I got the cake to the party (about 2 hours later), anywhere the purple had touched air it lost it's purple and was simply a lighter blue. When you poked through the crust though, it was still purple underneath. I think it's time to buy new purple dye...

I wasn't really sure what to do with the top of the cake. The cake of inspiration was a wedding cake, so the top was covered with fresh flowers. Well, when in doubt, go with chocolate. I made a chocolate glaze instead of a ganache, because my ganache recipe is fairly thick and I wanted the effect of the chocolate dripping down the sides of the cake.

So there it is. I'd still like to try these horizontal buttercream stripes on a tiered cake, but it was a great experiment and turned out really cool! Now I just have to dream about my next colour combo for the stripes...

Happy Caking!

- Carolyn