Whenever I get really large cake orders I get excited for the challenge. Everyone knows making high volumes of food at home is tough, but definitely doable. For this particular order I made 50 lemon raspberry cupcakes, and one 6″ cake which I get to show you below. I made a step by step tutorial but sadly my hard-drive (which held all my media files) died on me so I will not be able to upload a video tutorial. Womp womp wompppppp. I am still sad about losing all my footage and personal photos I’ve collected over the years, but as we know, nothing is permanent and I will eventually get over and let it all go.

In the meantime I am working on getting two tutorials up for the week and for now I thought I would post the recipe for the lemon cake below.

For my buttercream I used Italian Meringue Buttercream mixed with some raspberry jam to taste. I actually strained my raspberry jam through a sieve to remove any seeds because I piped the same buttercream onto my cupcakes, and since I used a Wilton 1B tip (image below courtesy of Wilton.com) I didn’t want to have to worry about seeds getting stuck in the tip, and ruining my piping.

After the cakes cooled, I cut them each into two even layers using a long serrated knife. I soaked each layer with simple syrup, and filled it with the raspberry buttercream. I masked the whole cake in plain vanilla buttercream, and for my drips I used a white chocolate ganache using 30g (2 tbsps) heavy cream and 100g (1/2 cup) white chocolate. If you’ve never made ganache before, you just heat the cream to almost boiling, pour over your chopped white chocolate, then stir to melt and combine.

Let the ganache sit and cool until it runs off your spatula and doesn’t settle back into the ganache right away (sort of like ribbon stage). If your ganache sets too hard, feel free to pop it back over a water bath for a few seconds until it reaches the perfect consistency — thick but still fluid. You want the drips to run down the side of your cake but slowlyyy, and then you want it to stop about halfway down your cake.

After the drips I made had set completely, I painted my drips using a mixture of gold lustre dust and vodka. The trick to doing this is to paint multiple thin layers in order to get an even coat.

The last step was to prep the flowers (which I bought because I don’t know of any florists near me that do food-safe flowers). I cut off the long stems using a wire cutter, and then I washed the flowers in warm soapy water, and thoroughly dried them off in a salad spinner. I gathered them together, and tightly wrapped the stems with plastic wrap to create a barrier between the cake and the plastic/metal, and I gently pushed it into the top of the cake.

Once the cupcakes were all layed out, and ready for piping, I piped simple rosettes onto all of them to make them look like a bouquet of flowers.

At the end of the day large orders from home are totally doable as long as you plan ahead of time and give yourself ample time and space.

Enjoy!!!!!