Birthday Cake

It was my first attempt at a 2 tiered cake, and proved really interesting. I ended up making 4 cakes, 2 layers per tier. To fit everything in I ended up making the top tiers on Monday and freezing them; it was a good opportunity to see how this worked. They turned out fine, I wouldn't hesitate to do it again.

The top layers are orange madeira cake with orange buttercream, and the bottom layers are chocolate madeira with umm nutella chocolate spread! The orange cake had orange juice in it and was lovely and moist. The chocolate one I'll reserve judgement on. It used real chocolate and I think it hardened a little before I got the mix in the oven, plus it was a bit dry. I might try it again and use some more milk.

Anyway, the recipes are from 'Ultimate Cake' by Barbara Maher. It's not a bad book. The instructions are well explained and the pictures helpful, but the pictures are at the front and the recipes at the back which I found a little odd. Also, though not very important I suppose, but the colour scheme is a bit weird, pale pink and green cakes make me feel a bit quesy, but maybe that's just me. I suppose the indictor of how good I think it is, is that i've had it a year or two and only made one other cake out of it. Unfortunately I couldn't find the recipes online.

In the past my cakes tend to have a camber on the top, so I trimmed the top off them both and inverted the top one before covering in jam and fondant icing. This gave a really good flat top.

I used dowells for the first time, but they weren't exactly level, so it was lucky madeira cakes are fairly sturdy! I need more practise I think.

I went for a pink and brown theme just because I think it looked nice, and as you can probably see it was for a 50th birthday.