Robin's Egg Speckled Cake for Easter

 

I'd always wanted to make a Robin's Egg Speckled Cake for Easter and I'm so happy I got to take that off my baking bucket list!  Last year I made Robin's Egg Speckled Cookies and this year I made it as a cake.

This cake was a carrot cake made in two 6" rounds using this recipe from the Sally's Baking blog, the exact same recipe I'd been successful with for last year's Easter cake. I baked the cakes on the Friday and wrapped them up overnight before frosting them on Saturday morning right before we left for Grandpa's house. In the recipe notes, I wrote that I baked the cakes for 37-40 minutes and they had come out perfectly baked.  This year, knowing that my oven runs a bit hot, I set the timer to check for doneness at 33 minutes. When I opened the oven, I immediately saw that the cakes had to come out, and a toothpick inserted into the center came out clean. However while they were cooling, one of the cakes got a little bit of a collapsed center - a sign that the oven was too hot and the edges cooked too quickly in relation to the center.  When we cut into the cake on Sunday, I was distressed to see that indeed, one of the cakes had a line of underbaked dough running through it. I hope no one noticed, and the taste was fine, but this was upsetting. If I'd left the cakes in the oven any longer, they would have been dry.  I'll have to try making them again at a lower temperature and see what happens.

For the speckled frosting, I used the buttercream and speckle instructions from this recipe from the Preppy Kitchen website.  I considered making Swiss Meringue Buttercream, which I prefer, but I didn't feel like dealing with this kind of frosting on the morning we were leaving. I also wanted to make sure I got the right color, and SMBC is hard to color.  I only used 4.5 cups of confectioners sugar instead of the 6 the recipe calls for, and so I had a bit less frosting to work with.  But since I wasn't doing any embellishments, this was enough and I even had a bit left over.  I thought it was still too sweet, and I added a few drops of almond extract and a bit more salt than called for. I still wasn't 100% satisfied, but I left it at that. Last year when I did the speckled cookies I had used diluted food coloring, and I much preferred using the diluted chocolate powder. I got the color by mixing Americolor Sky Blue with a tiny bit of lemon yellow.  The picture doesn't do it justice, but it was a perfect robin's egg color!

I got the idea for the robin-in-a nest topper because I have my silicone bird mold and from looking at my small collection of hen-on-nest dishes that perch on my kitchen windowsill. I made the bird out of white fondant and planned to paint it to look like an American robin. I put a lot of CMC powder into the fondant, but even so it didn't harden inside the mold and it was difficult to remove.  The bird figure came out with sides that looked pinched in and a misshapen head.  I had to re-shape the head and create a beak with my hands, but there was enough fondant that it looked OK in the end.  As I started to paint the bird, I no longer liked the idea of making it into an American robin because the gray feathers were going to look drab. So I painted the top blue and the belly and beak orange.  It ended up looking like a bluebird in a robin's nest, but it still looked pretty!

For the nest, I melted a sizable amount of brown candy melts and used a bowl lined with parchment paper. A shallow bowl I made when I took pottery classes a few years back worked perfectly. I dropped a lot of candy melt in the center, and slowly built up the sides in several layers.  It took quite a few passes raising up the sides with the knife and spatula and waiting for the candy to dry in between passes.  But I got a very nice-looking nest and the bird fit into it perfectly.

 

When finishing up the cake at Grandpa's house, I put blue malted robin's egg candy inside the nest with the bird sitting on top.  I'd planned to pipe buttercream swirls on the cake top and put a malted robin's egg on each one. But as soon as I placed the nest and the bird on the cake, I saw there was no room for buttercream swirls. I had the idea of surrounding the nest with a ring of the egg candy instead, alternating colors.  This fit just right and looked so fun for Easter!  Before cutting the cake I removed all of these decorations. I then placed an egg candy on each plated slice. 

The family loved the look of the cake and to my delight everybody wanted another slice for later!