Happy Easter!

Easter to Easter, it has been a year since we started Grace Cakery. Yay!
So, here's this year's Easter cake - A 3 tier barrel cake with chocolate bark and butter cream flowers. I'm generally a fan of pastel shades, but I just had to try my new electric gel color set by Americolor. I am loving it! It is a very refreshing color palette. Every time I look at the colors I feel like I just had a swig of minty lemonade on a hot summer's day. I could go on forever about the colors, so lets move on. :)

The cake had 2 tiers of carrot cake and a tier of brownie cake, because my nephews and nieces are huge chocolate fans. Last time I made a cake without a chocolate element, there were a lot of big tears. :( The chocolate bark was interesting. I found this amazing tutorial on pinterest. The melted chocolate on my brushes would harden in minutes. I finally switched to piping it on and using a palette knife to smooth or rough it up as needed.

For the buttercream I tried the easy Swiss Meringue Butter Cream (SMBC) made with pasteurized egg whites. This eliminates the need for cooking your egg whites over a double boiler. This recipe is really heavy on butter and quite thick, but it seemed quite stable and well suited for covering a cake. For piping, I mixed it with a little bit of piping gel to get it to pipe smoothly. This also gives it a slightly translucent appearance, which I like. Another technique I adopted for getting the right color variations, was using the bag in bag method. This is where you place your butter cream in the color combination you want, then wrap it up and put it in your piping bag with the tip. This method is described in detail in the book 100 Buttercream Flowers by Valeri Valeriano and Christina Ong and used by many others.

Hope you liked the cake and stay tuned for more! Happy Easter!