Easter Cakes

Just a quick post showing a few cakes I made around Easter. The first one is just a trial-run cake with this new frosting medium that I am using for an upcoming wedding cake for a coworker. They had a sample of Marco/Joe's nerdy birthday cake  and liked the bettercreme filling and want that used as all of the frosting - outside and in. Bettercreme is a nondairy icing by Rich's and it is basically the type of frosting they use at Walmart and Costco. I can buy a quart of it from my cake supply store for $6.99 so it is relatively pricey. It is light and airy and comes in vanilla or chocolate and then you can use flavoring like puddings, extracts, etc to embellish it. I'm not a HUGE fan .. because it's fake... but for being fake it is OK and I needed to see how it would hold up on the outside of the cake for piping and sitting out overnight. What I don't like about it is that it doesn't "crust" like real butter buttercream would, so it is harder to get a perfectly smooth finish and if you accidentally bump the cake later, you can't smooth it back over - that will be ruined.

So the little bettercreme cake was just a trial run and I used a carrot cake mix that I had leftover and brought it into work for my bride-to-be coworker to take some home and then give the rest to my coworkers. Yes, those are carrots on a vine to decorate the top and I am well aware that carrots do not grow on a vine.. get over it. :)

For Easter dinner with The Husband's family, I had volunteered to bring a carrot cake but that got veto'd by The Husband and others, so I decided to make a scratch yellow cake from The Cake Bible (which was a totally awesome recipe, best scratch cake ever!) and I used blueberry and raspberry preserves in between the layers, along with the rest of my bettercreme which was flavored with pudding. I saw this cake on Martha Stewart (which used lemon curd but otherwise looked the same as mine) and I liked the look of the cake with just filling and no frosting on the sides of the cake - sometimes too much frosting is annoying. I made a 1.5 batch of the Cake Bible's "All Occasion Downy Cake" which ended up being too much and the cake was taller than it needed to be ... another monstrosity from Kitchen Bliss. I topped it with fresh raspberries, blueberries and strawberries. I also made some chocolate-covered strawberries since I sprung for the stemmed strawberries from Nino's, and I decorated them with white chocolate. The Husband loved the cake so that made me happy, though I am still in trouble for not making him a birthday cake. Oops!