Sweet had her 19th birthday a few weeks back and I when I asked her what kind of cake she wanted she chose blueberry and lemon. So I came up with a vanilla blueberry cake with layers of homemade lemon curd covered in a vanilla Italian meringue.
To decorate, I decided to channel my love for Sweet and I came up with a mildly chaotic, colourful, beautifully whimsical cake.
Inspired by the feelings of Monet's water lilies and with cute meringue ducks swimming across the top it was a fun quirky cake.
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| To be honest I'm more team chocolate but the lemon curd layers are so pretty |
To make the the lemon layers in the cake I used the microwave lemon curd recipe from my YouTube video CLICK HERE FOR LEMON CURD RECIPE link.
I made 3 batches of my lemon curd and mixed in 1/2 a leaf of gelatine per batch (so 1 1/2 for all 3 batches) and set each batch into a 4" circle mould. It was a lot of lemon curd as a ratio to cake and I would probably use less if I did it again, although the layers did look super pretty. Disclaimer I am more of a chocolate fan so I do find lemon desserts a little overwhelming and I was eating it after a piece of chocolate cake.
Anyway I still had not decided how I was going to decorate the cake while I was making it. I was quite keen to use meringue ducks due to Sweet's fondness of both meringue and ducks however the cake design apart from lemon, blueberry and meringue ducks was not yet set.
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| The whole cake was really just background for the ducks |
Whilst I was filling and stacking the cake I decided it already had a lot of sweet layers going on and thought that a semi naked cake with not a lot of frosting would be best. Which swayed my design to this muted watercolour theme.
I barely used any buttercream in the decorating layer, perhaps less that 3/4 of a cup of buttercream on the whole four layer 6" cake which is quite scant.
To decorate I popped a few spoonfuls of my Italian Meringue Buttercream into seperate bowls and added a teensy touch of food colour and used a palate knife to pat on the coloured buttercream. Once I started I hated the colours, scrapped it off and realised it needed to be a bit more muted instead.
To achieve more muted colours, mix in a little of the other colours to 'muddy' them and take the clean edge of them. For example mix a little of the green or blue and yellow into the pink, a bit of the pink into the blue and green, and some green and pink into the yellow by just adding little touches of the already mixed buttercream into the other buttercreams (probably don't add extra drops of food colour for these small amounts of frosting it will be too much).
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| relaxed laid back decorating is my favourite kind |
Once I was happier with the colours I resumed patting on the buttercream with the offset palate knife. By pressing down and pulling up you get the rough looking finish on the top that I have achieved. I finished with a bit of food grade edible gold leaf applied randomly for a touch of luxury.
Once the cake was ready to serve I let Sweet choose the placement of the ducks and waterlily flowers.
We served this cake with macarons and a seperate chocolate cake which was a deep black cocoa tall layer cake. You can find the instructions and recipe for the chocolate cake by clicking here BLACK VELVET CAKE RECIPE LINK.
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| Black velvet chocolate cake (RECIPE HERE) and lemon layer cake 19th birthday cakes |
Although the vanilla blueberry cake was yummy I'm not ready to share it yet as I felt it didn't hold up well enough as a decorated layer cake. It still has a small amount of tweaking. Or perhaps I might look at turning it into more of a snack cake as the flavour is delicious.
stay tuned xx
Happy Baking
Linda M
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| I hand piped these adorable little meringue ducks. The babies were the cutest thing. |
Original photos and recipe from the Bubble and Sweet blog ©Linda McCubbin 2025. I love when people share my blog ideas and give credit. Please feel free to link back to my blog for non commercial purposes or contact me. Affiliate links and adds may earn me money, however all ideas and opinions are my own.
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