Violet Birthday Cake

I love birthdays! Birthdays are my new motivation to practice cake decorating and make lots and lots of flowers. Flowers are nice. I've been wanting to make the violet cake in my Wilton book which uses cute little violets in two tones. This is my first detailed cake entry so I am going to share all the boring details: My two 9" round chocolate cake layers came out with enormous humps - if a cake is baked properly, it supposedly comes out nice and flat, no humps - so I sawed them flat with my fancy new cake leveler and filled the middle with pink buttercream frosting (I had to use pink because I had planned rather poorly and made too much pink frosting for another project, and not enough white frosting for the outside. oops).

Filling the cake was no big deal at all. I am getting pretty good at slathering a large mound of icing nice and flat. Applying the crumb coat however, proved to be much more of a challenge, which I attempted at midnight last night after Oktoberfest and football madness. I had a sudden burst of crafty energy and found myself whipping up a batch of frosting as D snoozed in the living room. So. Crumb coating is a clever technique where a thin layer of frosting is applied over the entire cake to cement those annoying little crumbs in, which creates a smooth base to apply the pretty layer of frosting that your guests will see. My crumb coat was pale green, also due to bad judgment in frosting quantity. Here's the crumb coat and pretty coat.





The violets are piped with a turn of the wrist using a deep-closed flower tip. The pale purple was done with stiff consistency icing, which made funny pokey bits. The darker violets are piped with thinned-down icing which turned out much better, with less pokiness (but took longer to dry). Gatsby participated in the cake festivities.






I think the birthday girl will like it, pink and green insides and all.



One more photo I had to share...D and I went out for brunch yesterday and I ordered a fancy Stuffed French Toast. It was delicious, but have you ever seen so much butter?! Good grief. There's even a third square of butter you can't see behind the front two pieces. Next time I'll have to ask them to put butter on the side.