Hand Painted Chevron Birthday Cake

"Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art." -- Eleanor Roosevelt

My friend's mom celebrated her 50th birthday on Sunday and in true C fashion, he left it until the very last possible moment to let me know he wants me to "whip something up" to surprise her. I told him flat out, 'NO'!

Can you tell that wasn't my final answer?

I am normally not easily persuaded - twist my arm until the bones crack and shatter and I generally won't budge.  Anyone who knows me well will attest to that. I was labeled stubborn and overly inquisitive as a child and those labels still stand today, albeit honed.

Um... sure... you say as you eye the cake on the screen. So now is a good time to make it clear that I was not persuaded - I simply changed my mind. If you knew his mom, you'd understand.

She is a super sweet, beautiful, fun-loving, 50 going on 35, uber-intelligent without being intimidating woman. She is classy, but down to earth and given more time I could have come up with something that more closely represented her.

Chevron cakes have been quite popular the last little while and they still seem to be of late. I made a chevron cake back in August using the fondant transfer technique from JessiCakes blog. It's a very effective technique and can be applied to a number of different applications. I also used her upside-down masking technique. SCARY!!

For my Hand Painted Chevron Birthday Cake, I decided to hand-paint the chevrons onto the cake using gel and powder food colours diluted in a little lemon extract. I thought the gold and purple would speak to her classy, regal look and the chevrons to her fun, easy-going personality. I was very foolish to think painting would take less time and effort than the above mentioned method. The colour separation was a little murky, so I decided to add strings of fondant made using an extruder, to cover up my mistakes and add some interest.

I was reminded I am not a natural painter. Heck, I could hardly stay inside the lines of my colouring book as a child. So why would I think that this would be any different! Rushing this at the last minute certainly did not help.

Mrs. M is a fellow chocolate fiend, so I used one of my favourite chocolate cake recipe for both tiers and filled each layer with an SMBC recipe I will share with you in a future post - it is to die for! I then masked the cakes in white chocolate ganache and fondant. The cake is a little wonky, my stencilling and piping were way off point, but my edges turned out not too shabby. I was happy to have a few minutes to take a couple photos of the completed cake to share with you.

Well, we shan't live in the past. I was told the cake was loved and enjoyed by the birthday girl and all in attendance on.

Now,  I have a confession to make. Ok, I didn't change my mind all on my own, I was a little persuaded by theatre tickets, a bottle of wine and a few other goodies and favours. Gosh, now I sound cheap and easy. Just forget everything I said above about not being easily persuaded. Clearly, I have proven otherwise by way of this post.