Egg Free Birthday Cake

It isn’t unusual to be asked, or even for me to offer to make a birthday or celebration cake. When I have the time for it, I am more than happy to oblige, and I am at my happiest when the creative freedom is left down to me.

It was leading up to my friends’ baby’s first birthday, and they asked if I could make them a cake. I was of course more than happy and a little honoured. The birthday boy is allergic to eggs, and the parents were happy for me to do basically as I pleased, so my constraints were fairly simple. An egg free, vanilla cake.

The theme of the party had an arts & crafts vibe. So, I did some digging and took some inspiration from the cake miestro Katherine Sabbath.

I did a little research into egg free cakes and found a recipe from Mommy's Home Cooking that I was comfortable with and with a little nifty conversion from cups to weights, I was set.

I decided to keep it relatively simple; vanilla sponge, vanilla buttercream and just a playful hit of raspberry in between the layers. This was for a 1 year old after-all. I couldn’t start pulling out my personal favourite flavours combinations.

The buttercream needed to be a simple American style buttercream. However dreamy Italian/Swiss meringue buttercreams are – the egg obstacle got in the way. N.B. I wasn’t asked to avoid sugar or food colouring, PHEW!

I chose to make it a 4-layer cake – for increased height, although next time I might push it to 5. I filled 2 layers with raspberry jam and one with a generous hit of butter cream.

Using the tip of a small offset spatula, working with one colour at a time, I added splodges of buttercream fading from white at the bottom to the full colour spectrum at the top. I worked with one colour at a time and then went back if I felt it needed more.

I was pretty happy with the outcome. I will definitely experiment more with this style at some point. I am constantly on the search for my own unique style.

Major benefit of this technique meant I didn’t actually use an awful lot of buttercream on the outside of the cake. A simple crumb coat, and the light splodges actually made for a modest amount of frosting on the outside of the cake.

You can see from the pictures, that the outcome was a success, and most importantly my friends were happy with how it looked – and everyone at the party seemed to enjoy the cake too - regardless of it being egg free!

Some of the young guests had their own special intolerances, so I made some 'free from everything' cupcakes for the party too. They needed to be dairy, gluten, nuts & soy free. The cupcakes I made seemed to go down a storm, I’ll write about those next.

A huge thank you to Oriana at Mommy's Home Cooking for publishing this great recipe which I will no doubt call on again in the future.

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