Mum's birthday cake

When I received Edd Kimber's new book for Christmas I immediately knew that the first thing I would bake from it would be one of the layer cakes as they all look fantastic. Since Mum requested raspberries and white chocolate as her birthday flavour combination I attempted the Raspberry Ripple cake.

Boy did this cake involve a lot of work. By nature I am not a complicated baker, I like fairly simple recipes and tend to shy away from scary things such as macarons or even meringues, so this was quite a challenge for me.

Mum and her candle-blowing grandsons.

Although everything appeared to have turned out the way it should have, I just wasn't very sure about the overall cake. Similar to Hummingbird Bakery cupcake mixtures, the sponges came out of the oven beautifully risen and fluffy looking, and then after 5 minutes sank flat. Although the sponges had a nice flavour they were quite rich and dense (I suppose there were 6 eggs!) so it didn't take much eating to become full!

The only big problem I encountered was the icing. I was surprised everything went according to plan, it didn't even curdle with me, BUT I realised that I had added salted instead of unsalted butter and the resulting flavour was like licking oily, salty, chocolate meringue (there's a lot of butter in the icing). I rescued it by adding raspberry jam and some icing sugar to sweeten it up and piled fresh raspberries on top which added a clean flavour to cut through the icing.

Although I am pleased I actually managed to create this cake, I still feel slightly miffed that it took loads of time, effort (and butter and eggs!) to make when I probably would have been just as happy with a quick victoria sponge and fresh fruit. I wasn't entirely sold on the italian meringue icing either as the butter gave it such an oily texture, although perhaps it would have worked out better if I had used the specified unsalted butter. It's something I'd quite like to try again. I also think this type of recipe would be a lot easier if I owned a stand mixer as my poor arms and hand held mixer found it hard to multi task with the cooked icing.

Despite all my gripes, it did look super impressive and everybody thought the cake and icing tasted much better the next day. And they couldn't have been lying as there was no cake left for me after work! You'd think a three layer cake would last longer wouldn't you!