A Girly Girl Birthday Cake

I made this cake at the request of one of my friends as she needed a cake for her Mum's 80th birthday today.  My remit was pretty open, it just needed to be pink and flowery, along the same lines as Miss SP's birthday cake, and because the Birthday Girl doesn't really have a sweet tooth it needed to be more on the lemony side. Oh, and it needed to be gluten free too!  Apart from that I could do whatever I wanted.

I started off by making a sponge cake that was in a cake decorating book I got for Christmas.  Only problem was it sunk in the middle owing to some over zealous batter dipping in the centre on my part.  The book instructed that sponges tend to peak in the middle so to prevent this you should make a dip in the batter in the centre.  The cake itself is fine, I just couldn't face trying to 'pad out' the dip, so I've popped it in the freezer and I'll make it into a trifle one day soon.

After this I returned to my new 'old faithful' cake recipe. To make it more lemony I added the zest and juice of 2 lemons and then just evened out the amount of cream required once the lemon juice was in.  In hindsight though I should have just kept the cream amount the same, gluten free cakes do tend to be dry and crumbly even after soaked with a limoncello syrup.

The cake has a lemon curd (shhhhhhhhhh - don't tell Hubby where all his lemon curd went to!) and buttercream centre and was then 'dirty iced' with more buttercream before being covered with fondant icing.  I then used pale pink flower paste to make the flowers and stuck them on to the cake with some royal icing.  The centres are also made with royal icing.  The cake design is based on one in Eric Lanlard's book, Glamour Cakes (that I also got for Christmas!)

My friend came around to pick the cake up last night and seemed very pleased with it ... fingers crossed it tastes OK!