My Butterfly Cake

Hello People,

Last week was my birthday which I thought I would honour by making my first tiered cake ever (actually I just wanted to practice making tiered cakes for a certain upcoming event). I think on the whole it went pretty well, I am relatively pleased with the result (and it tasted good too!) I have decided that the key to a successful cake is to keep it nice and busy and draw the eyes away from the crookedness and bumps in the icing ;-)

So here is me crumb coating the cake. Basically there were three tiers of carrot cake, each cut into three levels and filled with cream cheese icing and pineapple and then crumb coated in buttercream to smooth the edges in preparation for the pettinice.

And then the fabulous Kirsty came and helped me roll out and smooth down the pettinice on the tiers (and judging by the job I did on the cake board it's a good thing she did :) Here is one tier after the pettinice has been put on.

Now I tried painting the icing but that didn't really work out so I covered it in coloured fondant and piped chocolate on. That worked much better! I then attached chocolate ribbon (it neatened the edges). Here are the three tiers with the stripes and ribbon. Still kinda messy I know!

That's where the busy is better comes in. Earlier in the week I made chocolate butterflies (idea borrowed from my awesome Hello Cupcake book I bought in NYl; note the white sprinkles were individually picked out with a toothpick- that's dedication!) and chocolate leaves (the easiest cake decorating technique ever!), and whola! A three tierd, rolled icing cake.