Happy Birthday Auntie Eng!

See, I am trying to catch up!  Allow me to share another post with you today, dear readers.  Today, I want to share a special birthday (and cake).  Today's post is on a beautiful lemon-raspberry cake.  This was a super cute cake!  It was only about six inches in diameter but super tall...around six or so inches high.  I didn't quite measure it...all I knew was, it was tall...I was actually a bit hesitant to ice it and actually, truth be told, I was actually pretty scared of the cutting part.  I had recently played around with my vanilla cake recipe.  The last time I made vanilla cake, I wasn't too happy with the dense texture...so I thought I'd play around a bit and come up with something else.  And this was it.  This was a soft,  yet dense (but not too dense), spongey kind of cake.  I added my coveted vanilla beans and thin bright yellow lemon rinds for a hint of that "something special."  I had two layers of creamy vanilla Swiss meringue buttercream, topped with a tangy lemon-lime curd, with chunks of freeze dried raspberries on top, and a middle layer of creamy custard to cut through all that tangy lemon-lime curd.  The middle layer (the one filled with custard) was what made this cake unstable.  The Swiss meringue buttercream will firm up once it is cooled, but that custard...he sure was a troublemaker.  No matter how chilled he was, that custard stayed wobbly!  It's tasty custard though, so I forgave him.

Anyways, it was Auntie's birthday, so I thought I'd make a cute little cake to celebrate.  She is my mom's best friend and they've been friends since forever.  In fact, we kind of grew up together.  Her house was like a second home to my brother and me.  However, now, since we're all grown up and getting caught up in our own small families, it's been hard to see each other as often as before.  But if there's ever any excuse to bake a cake, a birthday is as good as it gets!  And like I said before, this little cake turned out pretty high, so it wasn't quite so little after all!

I decided to go simple with the decorations.  I think raspberries have a simple, understated elegance and will dress up anything!  And because this was a lemon-raspberry cake, I thought it was fitting to gown the cake with raspberries and silky Swiss meringue buttercream.

Happy Birthday Auntie!  May this year be just as blessed as last year!