Exotic Birthday Cake

So this past weekend was my mum's 50th birthday celebrations. She had a grand party in her home with half a million people (okay, so a little over half a hundred) and awesome food. The theme for the party was 'exotic', so people dressed up in togas and saris and all sorts of pretty clothes, and we ate Turkish gozleme and Indian curries (authentic!) and baklava and Turkish apricot cake and REALLY YUMMY STUFF. And of course, we'll be eating it for the next month.

I had the job of designing and making the birthday cake. Mum is a fan of white chocolate and raspberry, so that was a starting point, and I really wanted to try dark chocolate and lavender, just because it sounded fun. Raspberries somehow ended up becoming blackberries - I forget how, but Mum and her husband had picked blackberries earlier in the year and frozen them, so it was cool to use those anyway. And I convinced her in the end to let me use lavender, bwa ha ha, and it came from my garden :o)

SO. Double-layer cake, bottom layer dark chocolate & lavendar mud cake with lavendar buttercream, top layer white chocolate mud cake and blackberry with blackberry buttercream. Only I forgot to put the blackberries in the white choc layer, so it was just white choc mud in the end o.0 :)

As for the exotic theme, the colour scheme was green, pink and purple. After speaking to the lady in the cake shop I decided to buy pre-coloured pink fondant, but I'm kind of sorry I did - the pink wasn't hot pink as advertised, but more of a bright candy/Barbie pink.

I decided to marble the icing, but on reflection I thought two layers of marbling might be too much. We browsed through pictures and decided on stripes:

I layered the cake up, stuck on the gold flowers, and decided it needed a topper - so off I went with the Middle Sisterous One to shop for silk flowers. We determined while at the craft store that buying gold braid would be quicker and easier than making a gold rope out of fondant to go around the bottom of each layer, but the store didn't have anything decent in proper gold. Then I found sequins B-) It was an exotic cake, after all.


And it looked gorgeously rainbow cut up and served :D