Blessed 21st Birthday!

One day, my colleague J came to me and asked me whether I could help her with her birthday cake for her upcoming celebration. As I talked to her, I realised it would not just be a normal birthday, but her 21st! She is interested in my cupcakes, after seeing the posts on my blog.

Her birthday theme is rustic country and I had a hard time coming up with her cake's theme. I finally decided it has to have something to do with fruits and flowers and initially suggested a white and green theme with apples and daisy flowers. However, as we discussed further, we narrowed down to a orange and brown colour theme instead. Why? ... I couldn't quite remember actually, but I suggested the cakes would be orange with chocolate, and also chocolate with orange. Oranges because I kept having images of bountiful harvest from the orchards in country farms since the party theme was revealed to me. As for chocolate, well, simply because it goes wonderfully together with oranges and the pairing can never go wrong. Also, the duo wll fullfill the colour theme we want as well.

As J like the display of cupcakes on my cake stand, I decided to make exception to loan it to her. For those of you who has read my blog on how the cake stand came about, you would know how special it is to me. All the more so now as the 3 tier design is hard to come by these days. As it would be a special celebration, I decided to make a 6 inch small cake for the top layer of the cake stand, instead of a display of 3 layers of cupcakes. However, I also left it to J to decide on the actual display as it can be versatile.

For the light cloured jelly layer to stand out, I had added a thin layer of orange white chocolate mousse as a last layering for the mousse making it a total of 8 layers for the small cake. 

For the cupcakes, I also made two variations, one with orange butter cream and the other, orange infused chocolate butter cream. I really love the end result and hope they add special moments to the birthday girl's special birthday celebration.

Orange buttercream icing with dark choclate orange infused sponge cake.

  

I wanted to give the orange slices a shiny layer and hence dipped them in sugar coating syrup. Unfortunately, our humid weather here just doesn’t make it ideal for this and the coating just kept melting. In the end, I had to peel them off.