Buttercream Flower Valentine’s Cake

Hello beautiful people! Some of you may know that I do cake orders and make custom cakes for people in the area, so even though I mostly have free reign over my cake designs, I still have to follow a theme. Every once in a while, I make a cake all for myself and I go wild — really using this as a time to experiment with new techniques and try out different designs. Since Valentine’s Day is coming up I wanted to do something with a little strawberry, a little chocolate, and a whole lot of looooveeee!

When I think of Valentine’s Day, I think of pink and red hearts, chocolate-coated strawberries, and bouquets of roses. With all this in mind I decided to create a vanilla cake, chocolate buttercream, homemade strawberry compôte or strawberry jam, and some crème patissière aka vanilla custard. I was also feeling inspired by flower bouquets and floral prints, which this is what lead me to create a painted and piped flower cake.

I also used a 6″ round cake in order to create a tall profile, and have a bigger area to use as a “canvas”. I wanted to fill the top of the cake with piped flowers to simulate a bouquet, a ring of painted flowers at the base, and for the flavours to reflect the somewhat classic flavour of chocolate and strawberry for Valentine’s. Feel free to check out the video tutorial below and may your Valentine’s Day be full of love and good company!

Here are the recipes:

Vanilla Cake

Time: prep 20 min, bake 35 min
Difficulty: easy
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Ingredients
130g (2/3 cup) soft butter
230g (1-1/3 cup) sugar
2 eggs, at room temperature
200g (1-3/4 cup) cake flour
8g (1-1/2 tsp) baking powder
3g (1/2 tsp) salt
145g (2/3 cup)milk
5g (1 tsp) pure vanilla extract

Method

Preheat your oven to 180C/350F.
Grease and line 2 x 6″ round pans with butter and parchment paper.
In a stand mixer with your paddle attachment, cream your butter and sugar on medium speed until it becomes pale and fluffy.
Add in your eggs and beat until light yellow and thoroughly combined.
In a medium bowl, sift and whisk together your flour, baking powder, and salt. Add half of your dry ingredients into the butter sugar egg mixture, and mix to slightly incorporate everything. Stop the mixer, add in all the wet ingredients, mix to incorporate, and then add the rest of the dry. Mix slowly to incorporate at first, the blast the mixer up to medium/high speed for 10 seconds to whip the batter until it’s smooth.
Divide the batter between your pans, and bake for about 30-40 min or until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean.

Strawberry Jam

Time: 20 min
Difficulty: easy
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145g (1 cup) fresh strawberries
50g (1/4 cup) sugar (optional)
5g (1 tsp) vanilla extract

Method

Place all the ingredients into a small saucepan over medium heat, and cook to soften the strawberries.
Take off heat, and using a potato masher, fork, or handblender, crush or blend the strawberries.
Place on medium heat, and let the strawberry mixture boil until it’s reduced by half, or until thickened.
Let cool and enjoy!

For my buttercream, I used my Italian meringue buttercream recipe and added 21g (3 tbsp) cocoa powder to add in a chocolate flavour, and I also added in layers of vanilla bean pastry cream in between the cake layers (optional, but definitely recommended!)