Blue Hombre Daisy Graduation Cake

I accidentally made a wedding cake.  Well, it didn't look like a wedding cake but it was certainly as big as a wedding cake.  No joke, this thing was super tall.  It was supposed to feed 45 people but it easily would have served 80 as we barely even touched the bottom tier. 

I figured that because I only have 9", 8" and 6" pans that I definitely needed three tiers to feed everyone.  What I neglected to do was to adjust the amount of batter I made so each of the three layers in each of the three tiers was pretty thick - hence the skyscraping cake.

No one got married to deserve this cake (and who says you can only have a ginormous, multi-tiered cake on your wedding day anyway?) - the person who received this cake worked much harder than a bride, she graduated from medical school.  My sweet cousin worked her precious little tail off to become a Doctor so as far as I'm concerned she deserved the tallest cake I could make.  Let's consider it a deposit for all the free medical advice I'll be receiving in the future.

This cake is the benefactor of some of the cake testing I conducted a few weeks ago - the white cake to be precise.  What I didn't test at the time was making the cake hombre (you know, different colors inside) but, to my delight the coloring came out really well.  Although, I did learn that the cakes bake much darker than they look in batter form which I will note for future reference.  I was a little worried that the darkest layer was a bit smurfy, but in the end it turned out OK.

There was another surprise lurking inside this cake (besides the unforeseen blue when you cut into it) and that is champagne.  Using champagne buttercream to frost the cake was a total no-brainer because you must toast a graduate - it's the rules.  Plus, my cousin is a big wine fan... she gets it from me.

I covered the whole thing in white fondant and cut flowers out of the remaining fondant in varying shades of blue which was a hint to what awaits inside.

It had been a while since since I'd worked with fondant so there were some minor issues with cracking, but luckily I could cover those all up with strategically placed flowers.  All in all, I'm pretty darn pleased with how this cake turned out.  Plus, the graduate liked it so that's all that matters!

The vanilla cake recipe can be found here.

Champagne Buttercream

Ingredients
3 1/2 cups Powdered Sugar
1 cup Butter, at room temperature
1/2 tsp Vanilla Extract
3 1/2 T Sweet Champagne

Instructions
On medium speed, beat the sugar and butter together in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with paddle attachment until light and fluffy (about 3 minutes).  Add the vanilla and champagne and beat on medium speed for another minute.

Enjoy!
Julie