Spring Birthday Cake

You know, since I've started making cakes, people tend to assume I have the best birthday cakes myself. But honestly, I've never gone to the trouble before. This year I decided to break that tradition. It's my birthday cake means that I can decorate it how I'd always wanted to!

The cake itself is one of my favorites: maple cake. I just follow a recipe for vanilla cake and substitute maple flavoring for the vanilla. I briefly considered doing candied pecans as a filling like I did for my oldest's second birthday, but a couple friends of mine can't have nuts, so I started looking for a nut free alternative. Then I remembered a recipe from How to Cake It that I wanted to try. That was it. Cookie Butter Buttercream.

I made a batch of Swiss Meringue Buttercream and added a jar of cookie butter to it. If you've never heard of it, cookie butter is made from ground up Spekulatius cookies, which are kind of like crunchy ginger snaps. Tons of cinnamon. So yummy. We can get it around here, but we usually buy it in the Netherlands because it's about half the price.

 I filled my cake in cookie butter buttercream and noticed that the outside edge got a little darker than I wanted it to, so I decided to trim it off.

 Then I crumb coated and frosted my cakes. I made two: 10 inch round and 7 inch round.

I set up my workspace. I have started doing my cake decorating in the dining room so I don't take up the entire kitchen for hours and hours.

 I wanted soft, pastel colors, so I decided to base both colors on white. The 10 inch cake should be covered in lavender, so I mixed about 500g of white fondant with just a little purple fondant.

 I kneaded it through thoroughly, rolled it out and covered the cake. Through some miracle I didn't have to patch it this time!

The second tier, I wanted to make pale teal, so I took about 350g of white fondant and added one toothpick of royal blue and one of leaf green.

 The color was a touch more green than I wanted, but it was still lovely, so I rolled it out and covered the 7 inch cake with it.

 Then I stacked my cakes using straws as support this time instead of dowels.

I cut out the number 36 with a letter cutter. All the decoration is made with the last 150g of white fondant from the package of 1kg.

 I used a clay extruder for the first time to make the drop lines. Warning: these love to stick together!

 I separated the lines into individual strands.

 I made a mark in the cake at regular intervals to place my drop lines. 8 on the top tier and 12 on the bottom tier.

 Then, using edible glue applied with a paintbrush, I stuck the drop lines right into the groove I made before.

 I trimmed the drop lines to be even.

 I did not use any piping on this cake. It's all fondant. The shells I made were made using a shell border mold.

 I used all 3 sizes on the cake. The smallest one as a teardrop below the drop lines on the top tier, the medium one as the teardrops below the drop lines on the bottom tier and the largest one as a shell border along the bottom of the bottom tier.

 I continued this pattern all the way around both tiers.

 Then I made fondant bows for where the drop lines meet.

 One last point bothered me. The connection of the top tier to the bottom tier. So I used a flower cutter to cut out white fondant and cut them in half to use as a border around the 7 inch tier. Lastly, I cut small strips of fondant to connect the shells around the bottom.

I love how it turned out. Happy Birthday to me!