a peachy pink vanilla layer cake - #amyandkelsadventures
This might just be my favourite blog post of the new year! Mostly because it's over the top, and made all of my pink cake and floral dreams come true. Amy (from Constellation Inspiration) and I are celebrating our 2 year friendiversary today! It's crazy to me, since it feels like we've been friends for so much longer than that.
All of our adventures in case you missed them....and there are more on her blog!
How we met (Lavender macarons & Earl Grey Cake)
Our first cake meltdown (hand-dipped animal crackers and a carnival cake)
A farm adventure (a dessert table in the orchard)
Our 1st friendiversary (4 cake craziness)
I love this girl, and so appreciate having a crazy blogger friend who "gets" me.
"Oh, you want to wait 10 minutes before eating breakfast to take a million pictures of our crepes and coffees too? Great! And you also spend your weekends buying 100lbs of butter, baking cakes, destroying your kitchen, and washing thousands of dishes? Same!"
Ha! It really is a gift to have someone to bounce ideas off of, rant to, and of course, dream up incredible spreads with.
We are also so so lucky to have been able to work with Kari from Confetti Floral on this! She's an Abbotsford local, and has a shop less than a 5 minute walk from me. Her style is so dreamy and effortless, and she puts in so much care and detail to everything she does. She even did the flowers for my sister's wedding in Summer! I reached out to see if she wanted to collab with us on a subtle Valentine's day shoot, and was over the moon when she said yes.
So let's talk about this cake. Amy has the recipe over on her blog....so pop over and grab it! Amy made a divine vanilla cake from Tessa (aka Queen of Cake). I whipped up a swiss meringue butter cream to pair with it, and we added freeze dried strawberry powder for taste and a natural pinky peach colour. So lovely. We had the hardest time deciding which florals to place on top, but we managed. Ha! I also had brought a few macarons as well, and can't get enough of how cute the mini ones are.
We used a bench scraper to frost the cake, and applied a few thin layers of icing, gently turning the cake and using the bench scraper to smooth the sides each time. The look we were going for was "almost naked". You can still see a bit of the cake peeking through, and the icing isn't super thick. If you choose this method, then you will likely have a bit of icing left over from the recipe below. I like to store extra icing in the fridge for a few days, or even pop it in the freezer until I need it! And I know that swiss meringue can be kind of intimidating if you've never made it before. Heck...it's still intimidating to me! Tessa from Style Sweet Ca has a wonderful post on everything you need to know, as well as troubleshooting. I always have trouble with getting my meringue to set up nicely if it's pouring rain outside, so that's a bummer, but I also know that if it's raining to choose a simple butter cream instead.
strawberry swiss meringue butter cream
base recipe from: Tessa at Style Sweet Ca
yields: about 3 1/2 cups - enough to frost a three layer 6 inch cake- more generously than we frosted ours (double for a three layer 8 inch cake)
ingredients:
1/2 cup egg whites (3 to 4 large eggs)
1 cup granulated sugar
1 1/2 cups unsalted butter, cubed and must be at room temperature
2 tsp vanilla extract
2 tablespoons freeze dried strawberry powder
directions:
Prepare a double boiler. Fill a medium-large sauce pan with a few inches of water, and bring to a very gentle boil. In a metal mixing bowl, add egg whites and sugar, and whisk together until combined. Place mixing bowl over the simmering water. Whisk the egg white mixture as you heat, and bring to 155-160 degrees F so that the egg whites are pasteurized and the sugar will have completely dissolved.
Remove from heat and whisk mixture for about 8 minutes. You're looking for a room temperature mixture that has whipped up into shiny, medium stiff peaks. Swap the whisk for a paddle attachment (or normal beaters if using a hand mixer), and mix in butter on low, just a couple tablespoons at a time. Wait for each addition to completely mix in before adding more butter. Once all the butter has been added, turn mixer up to medium, add in vanilla and strawberrypowder, and mix until the icing is nice and smooth. This should also knock out air bubbles, so don't bump up your speed to high!
Frost cake as desired.