A Difficult Frozen Cake

Intense discussions over a three month period resulted in an agreement with my about to turn 3 niece that I would make her a sunflower cake for her birthday. This would allow me to practice my non existent fine piping skills. As for her benefit, she likes sunflowers (at least I convinced her that she likes them because I really wanted to copy a nice design I'd seen on YouTube).

Then came the last minute news from my sister. It's a Frozen party. So sunflowers out, Frozen in. And this was the result:

This cake was quite the adventure: first I made three chiffon cake layers which took on an unattractive purple color and were nuclear dense. So I tossed those and made what is known as a "Reverse Creamed" cake. It rose up in the oven like a champ to fill two cake pans completely, so I was able to split those into a total of four layers allowing for superior height factor.

Something went horribly wrong with the color. I'd wanted to make it pink and have a slight berry taste so I used freeze dried strawberries that I'd blitzed and a bit of natural food color. The slight berry taste was there, but the color: sepia. Because chemistry apparently. I compensated by making the chattily cream layers pink which I think would have looked nicer next to whiter cake layers.

Then I tried to make a swiss meringue butter cream because I wanted to try something other than the ermine frosting I always make (in particular because I'd originally planned on piping flowers so I thought SMBC would be stronger). This turned into a herculean effort to get the temp of the meringue down to what Claude told me was supposed to be 70ish degrees. My Kitchenaide heated up hotter than it's ever heated, but it survived what ended up being a 45 minute mixing ordeal (I took 10 minute breaks a couple of times because I was afraid it was going to melt). It came together in the end, but though I purposefully increased the SMBC recipe by 1.5, that still wasn't enough for me! My struggle with disappearing frosting continues.

I was trying to use natural food colorings for everything but I just couldn't get a descent purple and blue, so in went the random synthetic colors I had sitting around. They're fine -- literally a drop or two spread out over an entire cake isn't really the problem.

The end result: a moist, delicious cake with a baffling interior color scheme and silky buttercream frosting that made my niece and her cousins' tongues blue.

I have no idea who most of the little SD characters I put on top are. I know the two sisters and the snow guy. But that's it.

My next cake will be a mini two layer 6 inch chiffon cake. I'm determined to get non dense chiffon! Determined!!!!