Last week my cousin's son Josh turned seven and we got together with family to celebrate at a pool party. Josh loves vanilla (in contrast to his chocolate-loving older sister, who got a Brooklyn blackout cake when she turned eight a few months ago) so I decided to go with an old stand-by that I have made for countless birthdays: Restaurant Eve Cake. I've been trying to step up my cake-decorating game so I wanted to try covering the cake in fondant, using the rolled fondant recipe from Rose Levy Beranbaum's Cake Bible. I flavored the fondant with orange extract (I would have used lemon extract except I just ran out) and to reinforce the orange flavor I added some orange extract to the Restaurant Eve buttercream recipe as well.
I hadn't given any thought to the design or color scheme of the cake in advance so the end result was pretty much accidental. (In retrospect, I'm wondering if I have a subconscious preference for yellow-orange-green cake color schemes, because this cake reminds me of the birthday cake I made for my friend Dorothy -- also a Restaurant Eve cake -- back in 2010.) I didn't have any trouble covering the cake with an unblemished layer of fondant and I'm kicking myself that I never tried this technique before now; I always thought it would be prohibitively difficult but watching a few YouTube videos ahead of time made it fairly easy. I had less success hand cutting fondant letters to spell out "Josh" for the top of the cake, but I was still pretty satisfied with the final product. Plus, the pool party was held at noon on a very hot and oppressively humid day, and even after keeping the cake outside (in a cardboard bakery box, in the shade) for more than 90 minutes before serving, it was still in perfect condition.
I really loved the way that the cake looked after it was sliced -- the fondant just made everything look so nice and neat. And while I didn't eat the fondant (although it tasted fine -- I just thought it was sugar overkill), a lot of guests at the party did. I was a big fan of the orange-flavored buttercream with the vanilla cake. This was a delicious cake and the birthday boy gave it a literal thumbs up. I couldn't have been more pleased with my first effort with fondant.
Recipe: "Restaurant Eve's Cake" from the April 23, 2006 Washington Post.
Recipe: "Restaurant Eve's Cake" from the April 23, 2006 Washington Post.
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