Happy Birthday, Lupe!!!!

Today is Lupe's Birthday!!! We celebrated last night at the London Gastro Pub in Monrovia. It was a surprise for her, and she was really surprised :) I made her a cake and I remembered her telling me before that she liked lemon flavored things. I have never made a lemon cake before and am not a fan of lemon flavored things, but I wanted to try it out and expand my cake horizons. I used a recipe I found from the Brown Eyed Baker's Newsletter. It is a Dorie Greenspan recipe and I stuck with the original lemon flavor. For the frosting I did not want to do a cream cheese again which is what the recipe called for. So I made a Lemon Butter Cream using the recipe from the Magnolia Bakery Cookbook. I had some raspberry puree I had previously made (The Cake Bible, Rose Berenbaum) so I used that for the filling too. This was also my first time make a 4 layer cake! It was easy and made the inside of the cake look really elegant. I will definitely be doing more of that in the future :) I was really pleased with the end results of this cake. It even tasted good, for being lemon that is! I was really glad to help make Lupe's day special.

Happy Birthday Lupe!!

Equalizing the batter

Lemon Butter Cream Frosting.

Mixing the colors. This frosting sucked in the color! They came out very deep and dark but still pretty.

Getting ready to pipe.

The first cake I made with filling was a mess because I did not learn to make a dam. Now with this tip under my sleeve, my cakes and filling stay put!

See, no mess! Well, except for the drips from the spoon on the side!

Getting taller! 4 layers.

I started using a bench scraper for the sides. Works really well! And I decided to stop using doilies under the cake, they make it hard to frost and do not add to the look of the cake at all.

All done! My drops flowers were not as pretty as usual. Not sure why the tip was not cooperating. My writing is getting better though. It is like trying to learn to write all over again in Kindergarten. But this time learning how to write with a fist and not your fingers.

I am pretty pleased with my shell border too. My squeezing pressure is becoming more even.

Aww she looks happy!!

Making a wish!

A poor pic, but I wanted one of the inside after slicing to see the layers.