1990's Cake

The 1990's was a revolutionary decade for baking. This decade popularised many flavours and styles of cake decorating that are still used often today. This decade popularised fruit flavoured cake as well as the iconic funfetti flavour. Fruit flavoured cake is still very popular today, and funfetti is often seen in children's birthday cake. In addition, styles such as barbie cakes using a doll and a cake as the dress, and heart shaped cakes have also remained popular today. Colours which were popular for decorating cakes included many hues of yellow, pink, blue, orange, red, and green.

For my cake I decided to create a 2 layer funfetti cake, shaped as a heart, with Swiss Meringue Buttercream. The cake was not my favourite as I felt it was on the drier side. The recipe which I used I will link here:https://sallysbakingaddiction.com/. I have realized that I prefer cakes which use oil as the fat over those which use butter. I feel that the butter always results in a denser and drier cake. This may just be my experience, but personally I think I will try to stick to recipes which use oil from now on. Because the cake turned out drier than I would've liked, I used a simple syrup (water and sugar) to add some moisture. For the Swiss Meringue Buttercream I loosely followed the recipe i usually use from Natasha's Kitchen linked here: https://natashaskitchen.com/swiss-meringue-buttercream-recipe/. Furthermore, if I continue to use this variation in the future, I will post a recipe.

To shape the cake I made slight indents in the cake, dividing it into fourths. I then cut off the edges of two sides, and glued them onto the remaining two sides with buttercream.

To secure it, I placed toothpicks in the edges, just for extra stability. I then covered the cake in buttercream and piped on the rainbows and hearts using a piping bag with a 1/2 inch cut. To pipe on the words and sprinkles I used a Wilton 4 tip.

Overall this cake was relatively easy to make, and i enjoyed doing it very much. One aspect I would like to correct for future cakes is my coloured buttercream. I find that when i add colouring to small amounts of buttercream it curdles slightly, leaving it looking bumpy. In future I think I need to add the colour, chill the buttercream, then re-whip it.