A Cake for Summer Birthdays
Our book and social club was getting together and the host asked me to bring a cake to celebrate the birthdays of all the summer girls. I'm always delighted to have a reason to make a cake, but especially for my girls!
I knew I wanted a chocolate cake because that's my best friend's favorite. When I saw this recipe I figured it was going to be great. Wrong! I already wrote a post about it.
Now I needed a new idea, fast. Leafing through my recipe binder, I remembered this recipe that Tessa Huff from Style Sweet published in The Cake Blog. I'd made if before, for Xmas 2020, and it was very good. I figured you couldn't go wrong with it! Even though it was already early evening I had to run to the store for ingredients because I don't keep frozen raspberries at hand.
The only glitch while making the recipe was that the water I poured into the batter may have been too hot. It had been in the tea kettle, and I think it was close to 200F. I wish the recipe was more explicit when it says "hot water". I followed the recipe to a "T" though. And I'd made it before. So the problem is not the recipe, yet the cakes didn't bake evenly. There was a visible contrast between the doneness of the edges and the center of the cake. This makes me think the oven is running hot. However, two oven thermometers say the opposite, that the oven when set to 350 is actually between 300 and 325 (depending on what part of the oven you set it on).
At this point I certainly wasn't going to start over with another recipe. I thought, que sera, sera!
Next, I needed to make a raspberry filling. When I made this cake before I used a raspberry reduction. But I didn't have time for that, so I tried a quick raspberry filling from Sugar Geek Show (recipe here). I wrote a separate post about this, but this recipe doesn't incorporate the cornstarch the way it claims to. However, it was quick to make! Now I went to sleep so the next day, the day of the event, I could decorate the cake.
This cake recipe calls for a cream cheese buttercream that looked delicious. However, several people on the blog post commented that they had trouble making it and that it was runny. I wasn't about to deal with that. I decided to make a raspberry Swiss meringue buttercream. I had 4 frozen egg whites, so I was able to use those. I hate separating eggs! I used some of the raspberry filling in the buttercream, but was careful not to use too much so it wouldn't be runny.
Usually with an 8-inch cake, I find I need two batches of SMB. Instead of going to all that trouble I made a batch of chocolate buttercream. I figured if I used the chocolate in between the layers, it would leave me enough SMB to decorate the outside of the cake.
When it came time to assemble the cake, I took Sugar Geek's advice to use the raspberry filling sparingly and no more than 1/4 inch. I was also looking to minimize use of SMB in between the layers. The dam around the layers had to be SMB because using chocolate would have shown the color difference. Usually I like to pipe two layers of dam using a half-inch tip. This leaves a lot of room in between the layers to be generous with the filling. But because of the above, I only piped one layer of a buttercream dam. Before doing so, I spread the chocolate buttercream on the cake, going up to about 1/2 inch from the edge, then piped the dam and then spooned the raspberry filling on top of that. I know from experience not to try to spread buttercream on top of a filling! I could tell at this point that the filling had not set the way the recipe claims. Perhaps that shouldn't be surprising, since so much of the cornstarch had formed blobs and had to be removed.
I crumb coated the cake then applied a second layer of raspberry Swiss meringue buttercream. After this process was finished, I was surprised to have quite a bit of SMB left over. I could have foregone the chocolate buttercream altogether! You really never know how things are going to turn out, in baking.
One of the frustrating parts of this hobby is that when I have a cake to make, it takes so long to bake the cake and prepare the frosting that there's usually not as much time as I'd like to spend on the fun part, ie decorating the cake. That was certainly true in this instance!
My original design was to use the small offset spatula to make diagonal lines on the side of the cake, then pipe buttercream flowers and place them in a wreath along the edge of the cake. But, the design never turns out the way I envision it.
Making the lines on the side of the cake was easy and fun. I followed this tutorial from the Wilton blog. The only suggestion I have for myself next time is to have more buttercream on the side of the cake and make sure it's softer. That way I'll be able to make deeper, more noticeable lines. With a thin layer of cold buttercream like I had, the lines were noticeable but a bit too subtle for what I was intending. I loved this technique and will definitely use it again. As I've said before, the small offset spatula is my favorite tool!
I piped lots of buttercream roses and buds using both the chocolate and the SMBC frosting. I also tried making buttercream dahlias using the Wilton 104 petal tip, same one I use for the roses and buds. I followed this tutorial from Cake Decorating School on YouTube. My dahlias didn't exactly come out the way theirs did, but it was different from the roses and very pretty. I was happy with it! I put the flowers in the freezer to harden and went upstairs to get ready.
The final assembly of the cake did not go as planned. I tentatively placed flowers along the edge of the cake in a wreath form and quickly thought I didn't like it. I think I panicked a little bit here. I think what I should have done is made the wreath, then dropped some buttercream stars using the open star tip, then filled the center of the caketop with raspberries. The problem that made me panic was the color contrast. The chocolate buttercream was pretty dark and the raspberry buttercream was a very light pink. The entire cake top looked bland. Besides this, the raspberry SMBC was pretty soft. I was afraid to put fresh fruit on it for fear the fruit would release liquid into it and make a mess. So what I did instead was place all of the flowers I had on the caketop, and grab some green buttercream that was left over from my Pineapple Birthday Cake and pipe lots of leaves in between the flowers. The minute I did this, I worried the colors didn't go together, because the green was so bright. But now I was working against time. I wanted to take some pictures of the cake, and I needed to get going.
It's so hard to get a good picture in my house! The lighting in here is terrible. Some day I'll have to break down and get a light kit. I snapped a few shots, and had to get going.
Meanwhile, there was a heat wave outside, with high humidity. I had put the car in the shade and turned it on with the A/C to cool it off so the buttercream wouldn't melt. It's always nerve-wracking having to transport a cake, especially when driving along. I decided the best and coolest place would be on top of a towel on the floor in front of the front passenger seat, with the air conditioner vents aimed at the cake. Fortunately it was the end of the day, so there wasn't a lot of strong sun hitting this spot.
What a relief to get to the book club gathering and hand over the cake! I was a bit worried throughout the evening by how warm the house was, but I was able to forget the cake and enjoy myself with my friends. We had lots of good things to eat including cheeses, a bean dish, hummus, salads, and home made Portuguese pastries. All the while, I could tell excitement was building a bit among the girls because I had brought a cake.
By the time we ate the cake it was after 10 pm and the cake had been sitting out in a warm house for several hours. When I cut into it, I was first of all relieved to see it wasn't dry. On the contrary, it was super moist! I'd thought the raspberry filling would be very runny, but on the contrary most of it had been absorbed into the cake and I was coming up with clean slices. I barely needed to wipe the knife between cuts.
The girls say they loved the cake, and I hope they did. My personal opinion was that while it was good, it wasn't as balanced as I'd hoped. You got a lot of chocolate taste and just a hint of raspberry. So next time, I'd use more raspberry sauce and not put chocolate buttercream in between the layers. My favorite part of the cake was how moist the chocolate layers were. Maybe the oven problem worked in my favor! The host told me this was her favorite cake I had made, and other people took seconds. I was thrilled about all this!
I really enjoyed making this cake! I can't wait to have another occasion that calls for cake.
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