Daring Bakers, March: Dorie Greenspan's Perfect Party Cake

At the beginning of every month, the ever-growing and always welcoming group of Daring Bakers (DBers) are assigned a baking challenge by the month's host, and at the end of that month, en masse, they blog about the baking project, revealing to the world what it is! This month's host was Morven, and she assigned Dorie Greenspan's Perfect Party Cake.

It's a fairly straightforward white cake recipe out of Greenspan's Baking: From My Home to Yours. It's lightly flavored with some lemon zest and frosted with Swiss meringue buttercream--an easy frosting, and one I prefer much more to American buttercream--it tastes less sweet and doesn't leave that horrible greasy feel in my mouth. We had to follow the recipe exactly, and we had to have four layers. Filling and frosting flavors were totally up to us.

I decided to use apricot preserves and honey




I love layering cakes


Even though I like Swiss meringue buttercream, I'm generally not a huge frosting fan, so I opted not to fill my cake with buttercream. I stuck with just the apricot honey filling.

I served the cake to friends at my monthly Savories and Sweets party on March 23, which, among other things, was my Mom's birthday. I dedicated the cake to her. I remember her watching her decorate cakes when I was a kid. They were always so beautiful, but I didnt' really appreciate them until I grew up and started decorating cakes on my own. She's so awesome. Happy birthday, Mom!


The other dessert was King's Hawaiian Bread with some blood orange curd I made (tasty!).


I was worried that my friends might not like it without the frosting filling, but they all agreed that it was just right the way it was, and I got great reviews: light, moist, very fluffy, and yummy.


It's definitely a cake worth making again! Thanks for a great recipe, Morven!