Bespoke Fault Line Birthday Cake

I've already blogged about how much we love creating bespoke birthday cakes in our style. But the bespoke cakes I absolutely love making are those where I'm given free rein. Between parenting, caking and consulting, time is tight. Scheduling time for creating a cake just for fun is an impossibility now. So when the opportunity to surprise and delight someone special comes up, I GRAB IT BY THE HORNS!

Nadine's birthday cake HAD to be stunning. We joked that it would be all things she's not into. A vegan, gluten-free, sugar-free, matcha-carrot cake. Nothing wrong with that of course, I'd nail it, but we know it's not for her. So whilst we joked about, I made layers of pink, vanilla and chocolate sponge to create the cutest bespoke Neopolitan cake.

That too, in a gorgeous fault-line style inspired by our own little Neopolitan cake.

Fault Line Cake Method - Stripe Scrape with Comb

It takes so much longer to create bespoke cakes. The umming-aahing over design, flavours, and when things don't work out...scraping and re-doing it. Standing back, scrutinising every detail, and self-critiquing is time-consuming stuff. And the pressure! OMG the pressure!

Fault Line Cake Method - Buttercream Stripes

4" cakes are a total PITA to make even in their simplest forms. We went the extra mile to make 6 layers of sponge. Frosting, scraping, striping, fault-lining...soooo many steps for such a dinky thing. But don't you think it looks LOVELY? I do. There's also that saying, y'know, all good things come in dinky packages.

We didn't just stop there though. I stacked it on top of another tall layer cake to make a two-tiered birthday cake. I then made it extra-birthday-cake-esque with buttercream swirls galore and cherries. Add some sprinkles for good measure, and some wafer curls, and Nadine's Neopolitan Fault Line Birthday Cake is complete! Two glorious tiers of deliciously moist sponge layers, Swiss meringue buttercream, and a whole lotta love.