This was a 40th Birthday cake for a family member. Vanilla cake with vanilla buttercream, filled with lemon and raspberry.

I doubled a vanilla cake recipe from Michael Smith and made a double batch of swiss meringue buttercream from Martha Stewart, my go-to buttercream recipe. I also made a vanilla-infused simple syrup using two cups of sugar and two cups of water, this was far too much however.

The bottom tier is actually two tiers of 7″. The very bottom tier is two 3″ high cakes torted once each and the top 7″ tier is a 2″ cake torted twice. The ugly white fake rhinestone ribbon hides the gap between the two tiers. More on that ugliness later.

The silver design was made by glueing silver leaf sheets to wafer paper with piping gel. I then used a decorative paper punch to create the circle pattern design. It took about 80 of them to wrap around the cake.

Next I worked on the wafer paper flower. I had a photo for inspiration. I wanted to make a flower similar to the one in the middle of the grey cake.

The next step was to make a ribbon in silver to look like a chain and attach isomalt diamonds to it. Fail. Fail. Fail. As nice as the diamonds were just sitting on a flat surface with light coming through them, they were completely lost in the decor when attached to the chain. I gave up just hours before delivery and made a simple pearl rhinestone ribbon out of Gumpaste and dotted it with edible silver paint. It was still wet when I delivered the cake so the ribbon isn’t completely straight. This and the oversized (too-large) flower make this cake one of my least favourites. I love how my shimmery petal dust made the top 6″ tier look however the lighting was bad where I took the photos.