A Weekend of Baking...Lemon limoncello birthday cake

This last weekend I was working on a birthday cake for my Nan, and she had asked for a zingy lemon cake with a lovely fresh taste. I decided to try a different recipe and picked a peggy Porschen recipe from her Boutique Baking book. I liked the sound of this one as it included a limoncello and lemon syrup that is used to soak the sponges after baking. It gives them a delicious moist and extra lemony zing along with the lemon zest, and the subtle hint of alcohol never goes down badly!

I started as always by making the flowers, and made a mixture of sizes of daisies to decorate the cake with. I tried to use a shallow metal bun tin to set my flowers, but despite dusting the wells with cornflour, the shapes still stuck. I prised them out carefully with a knife and I was lucky that they kept their shape as they were removed earlier than I would have liked.

I wanted to make a marbled cake board, but unfortunately the mixture of yellow and white was a little too faint to be seen properly. I have seen some very effective cakes use marbled sugar paste, and I will look forward to experimenting with this finish in the future with a darker colour to make the pattern stand out. As I wanted to add some gold touches I edged the board with some gold ribbon to make it stand out.

Once the individual flowers had dried I layered them and added a sugar pearl to the centre of each one with smaller ones for the individual smaller daisies.

I then sprayed half of all the flowers gold to make them stand out and to provided a colour contrast against the pale yellow cake.

Once the three layers of cake were baked, soaked in the syrup and cooled, I layered and filled them with lemon buttercream. I did a thin first crumb coat layer, and then chilled it before applying the second thicker layer. This made it easier to get a nice crisp and clean finish and it was very addictive trying to get the smoothest finish possible with a side scraper.

I then added the cake topper (which I really should have measured first as it was a little tight to the edges!)...

...and then started to add the flowers in random arrangements and spaces to create a natural look.

The taste was lovely and fresh and light, and the use of the food processor to make the sponge again wins in the texture and taste category. I found that there was a little too much syrup for the three sponges, but it did go towards making delicious cocktails for the evening!