Pink flowers cake - the best sort surely?

I love pink.

I love flowers.

I especially love pink flowers.

So really, there was nothing for it but to make a cake and decorate it with....pink flowers! It just so happened that my colleague at work was leaving to go on maternity, and better still, is having a little girl - a perfect excuse to make a pink flower cake - 

I even bought myself some little flower cutters, especially (some Hobbycraft vouchers came in handy).

I tinted the fondant icing with pink to make a dark and pale shade, then used the white fondant icing as well and got to work, stamping out flowers in different sizes.  I stacked some, added silver balls to others and pink sprinkly sugar crystals to others.

If I'm going to be a perfectionist about these things - I'd say that the buttercream didn't turn out as nice a pink colour as I'd have liked, it looked a little skin-colour but that was only apparent after the pink flowers were added...

Still, I was happy with the cake in the end and my colleague declared it the 'prettiest cake [she] had ever seen' - praise indeed!

The cake itself was a Victoria Sponge cake, nice and simple but a classic and who can resist a good ol' Viccy sponge eh? Mr Ellie has a particular fondness for my Viccy sponges and happily eats them warm from the oven - he'd happily forego the jam or buttercream and just eat the cake if I let him.  Needless to say, I never do as I'm cruel like that and insist on, as a minimum, a spread of jam in the middle and a sprinkle of sugar on the top!

My Victoria sponge is always made with a 4-egg mix and I'm afraid I always use two sandwich tins - I've never managed to get it right baking in one tin and splitting the cooked cake in two.  My top tip - weigh the eggs and then measure out the flour, butter and sugar to each weigh the same amount.  This way, it doesn't matter what size eggs you use, the proportions of the cake will always be right.  My second top tip is to use the best vanilla extract you can - ideally get the vanilla bean paste and use a generous teaspoonful.  If you can't get this, then the best vanilla extract you can find/afford.  Whatever you do, don't get vanilla 'flavour' - all you will taste is a bitter flavour in the cake - you'd be better off leaving it out altogether.  I don't buy expensive flour, butter or eggs - value ranges all the way for this gal! So I spend the extra on good vanilla bean paste and it is totally worth it.

This cake is just covered with a simple buttercream (again, flavoured with some vanilla bean paste), which is fine if the cake is going to be consumed fairly soon after decorating.  Within 24 hours, the fondant flowers start to absorb the moisture from the buttercream and go rather soft so bear this in mind.  It might be better to just crumb-coat with buttercream and then apply fondant icing if you need the cake to last a day or so.

This cake didn't last that long...
I work in a team of 12 people so it took all of about 20 minutes for them to demolish this and Mr Ellie lucked out completely - there was none left for me to bring home for him! I've had to promise him many more Viccy sponges in the future that he can keep entirely to himself. Its a hard life!

Miss E xxx