Daring Bakers - Dorie's Perfect Party Cake

Kia ora from Aotearoa! I am on holidays at present in New Zealand, so it it quite fun to be posting this DB's challenge away from home.

This month's Daring Bakers' Challenge is hosted by Morven of Food, Art and Random Thoughts, a fellow Antipodean. She has chosen Dorie Greenspan's recipe for the Perfect Party Cake, from Baking - From My Home to Yours as this month's challenge. You can find the full recipe on Morven's site, so I won't reproduce it here. Morven was very generous in that she allowed us to put our own "stamp" on the chosen recipe by experimenting with colours and flavours.

Initally, I was pleased about this challenge, as the cake in the book looks absolutely gorgeous, and I am, as my pseudonym suggests, a cake baker. I have also previously made two other cakes from Dorie's book, and they were just devine and very unique. However, during this challenge, the base cakes and I had several disagreements, so that I was in fact relieved when it finally came together and I could say that I conquered it.

My first problem arose when I left the cakes to cool in the tins for the obligatory 5 minutes or so after I removed them from the oven. The cakes retracted from the sides of the tins while cooling, but each cake stuck to the side of the tin in one spot, so that when the cakes retracted, they tore a little.

I next found that these cakes stuck to everything - they unmoulded just fine (even with the little tears), but they then proceeded to stick to the wire cooling rack, to the tray I flipped them onto so that I could line the wire rack with baking paper to avoid further sticking (causing a small hole to be gouged in the top of one of the cakes!) and to the baking paper that I used to line the cooling rack.

My final problem with the base cakes arose because the cake layers are not very thick, and when I cut one of the cakes in half (the pristine one without the hole), I cut it so crookedly that I had cut a small hole in the centre of one "half" ( and I use that word loosely). At this point, I decided that there was no going back, and forged ahead bravely, using the most robust layer (sans holes!) as the bottom of the cake.

And you know what - I was glad that I did. The buttercream frosting hid a multitude of sins and "glued" everything together. I decided to use home-made lemon curd in the filling instead of raspberry jam (which, although attractive in the original, would have been very sweet), and to flavour the frosting with passionfruit syrup instead of vanilla:

I thought that the lemon curd was perfect, as it cut through the buttery frosting to some extent. The passionfruit was not very noticeable in the final product, but added some interest by dotting the frosting at random with little black seeds. This is the final cake, which looks like a giant snowball:

Now, I am not a buttercream fan, and you will notice from my previous posts that I rarely use it. I dislike the mouthfeel of it, which to me is quite greasy. For this reason, I cannot say that I loved this cake (although it tasted just fine). However, I took it into work to share with my colleagues, and most people loved it. (This is significant, because I bake so often now that they don't comment at all unless I really pull off something out of the ordinary.) One person went so far as to say he thought it was "spectacular"! Just goes to show that taste is a very subjective thing.

Thanks to Morven for hosting this month's event. You can check out other permutations of this cake via the Daring Bakers' Blogroll, which can be accessed here.