The Baking of a Cake

The girls and I had a great 'adventure' in the making of this cake. Between our van breaking down on the way to Auntie Meagan's to pick up icing bags and tips, to forgetting to buy the much needed shortening at the grocery store, to leaving the cake in the freezer for 4 hours instead of just the one hour that it needed and finally to the FIVE plus hours that we spent on making the cake, lemon custard and the two different types of icing, to the actual grand finale (so to speak) of icing the top into the shape of 'flower petals'? To top it all off I decided to use lemon concentrate instead of fresh squeezed lemons (far too much work on top of all the other work to do) and the custard turned out far too sour in comparison to the rest of the very sweet cake.  Other than that it tastes great...sort of. The girls had a blast helping me mix the three colours for the petals and licking every spoon, fork and spatula in sight.

Here's the website in case you would like to see how the cake was supposed to turn out or in case you might actually want the recipe, because despite how mine turned out this time, I can see how with a few changes this could be a must have in my recipe cupboard. The buttercream frosting recipe is very good but the lemon frosting is AMAZING! This was our first attempt at any sort of 'not from box cake' and definitely the first time we have tried to frost the cake into any sort of defined shape or pattern. So by about 2 hours in I really think I was finally getting the hang of it!!

http://iammommy.typepad.com/i_am_baker/2011/03/hydreangea-cake.html