Cake-A-Month - January - Post 4

So I baked another batch of the coconut white cake from Beyond Buttercream. This time I doubled the recipe and made a couple of small tweaks - nothing major!
Last time I had put the equivalent of how much sour cream and milk were in the recipe which had come to approx. 450ml's if I recall correctly, however this time I just substituted 1x 400ml can of coconut milk per batch (so 2 cans for the doubled recipe). I also added more dessicated coconut (probably about one small handful extra). Also (and this probably sounds really obvious!) I added the coconut with the rest of the dry ingredients, whereas with the first batch I baked I had added it at the end where the recipe stated to add your flavourings.
So no major changes, although there was about 100ml less liquid in the end, and the cake turned out completely different! No problems with the batter being too runny this time, and the finished cake was light and fluffy inside instead of dense and moist. To be honest, I was slightly disappointed at the difference, along with my husband and in-laws who tasted the cake. We all agreed that while we could tell that the light and fluffy cake was what the end result was supposed to be, and probably what you would expect if buying a cake from a bakery, we all actually preferred the dense moist cake which had too much liquid. It seemed like...OH! I finally figured out what the texture of the other cake reminded me of! MUD CAKE! It reminded me of a white chocolate/coconut mud cake! Well, now maybe you can understand why we all really liked it LOL!

Well the final cakes (doubling the recipe made 5x 1" high 8" round cakes) tasted lovely, and would be perfectly fine if we hadn't tasted the mistake cakes of the day before! Now I think I'm going to have to go on a hunt for the perfect white chocolate mud cake recipe haha!

I then started experimenting with making the flowers for the cake. I had purchased 250gms of Cake Art's flower modelling paste (seems to me that it's simply gumpaste), a set of teardrop shaped cookie cutters and a set of fondant tools from eBay. I cut out a bunch of teardrops from thinly rolled gumpaste, used the ball tool to lightly ruffle the edges and glued them together with sugar syrup. I set the flowers in a small glass bowl overnight to dry.

Fantasy Ruffle Flower

I'm pretty happy with the end result for my first try, however I'd definitely like to work a bit more with the technique and perfect it. I'd like to make the petals look a bit more realistic and work on the underlying structure of the flower as I think the way I put it together was a bit flawed. I was in a bit of a rush at the time since I had my 3 year old trying to 'help' me and Baby Z was fussing for my attention at the same time. Hopefully if I have a bit more time tomorrow I'll be able to sit down and work on it a bit more and end up with some flowers I'm really happy with.
While I had a bit of time tonight I grabbed my new paint brush bought just for my cake decorating, and mixed a bit of yellow food coloring (I use Americolor gel colors) with lemon juice (I got this tip from Savannah Custom Cakes - check out their extremely informative videos on YouTube here!) and painted the center of the flower, lightly brushing the color out along the petals.
In hindsight, I should have painted each petal before building the flower, but I was mainly just testing at the time and didn't think ahead :)

I also made a batch of lemon curd today to go between the layers of the cake. I used the ingredients from this recipe for the lemon curd (except I used all egg yolks that I had leftover from baking the cake), but used the instructions from this recipe to make it in the microwave. Oh, and I ended up adding about 1/4C of extra sugar because I found the lemon curd slightly too tart for my taste. It worked well anyway and the final result was a really nice creamy lemon curd. I just worry that it may not be quite enough to fill the cakes!