cake for mother's day

As promised, here is the recipe for the cake I made on Mother's Day! So I was inspired by this charlotte recipe (from the blog My Little Fabric), but it was written in French. I'm not familiar with French baking terms (or metric conversions) so I wasn't going to kill myself trying to translate it. I didn't want to risk misinterpretating it, and end up with a bad dessert.

So I decided to make something that looks similar. I started with the actual cake. I followed this basic cake recipe from Sweetapolita, but I made some changes:

• I left out the almond extract and added 1tsp of rose water (although next time I would add a little less rose water, it wasn't as subtle as I had hoped for)
• I used coconut milk instead of whole milk
• I made a raspberry puree (handful of raspberries + little bit of sugar + blender) and added that in (and since I was adding a liquid, I left out a little of the milk)

I made two round cakes with the batter. After they baked and cooled, I shaved the top off to make them flat, and put them together with a thin layer of vanilla buttercream in the middle (using this recipe). I saved some of the buttercream for later.


Next I made lady fingers to wrap around the edge. I used this recipe from Cupcake Project. I piped them to be about an inch taller than the cake. They weren't hard to make and they tasted good, but they didn't turn out as tall and fluffy as I wanted them to. They all kind of melted together on the baking sheet. If you know any tips for making lady fingers, let me know!

I used the rest of the buttercream to stick the lady fingers on the edges of the cake. To finish it off, I made whipped cream to fill in the cake. I didn't use a recipe, I just combined heavy whipping cream and sugar until I got the consistency I wanted. I decorated the cake with raspberries and flowers!

If you have any questions about the cake, just let me know!