Spring is undoubtedly my favourite time of the year. It would be enough that the weather is generally just perfect so much of the time. But the way the entire landscape transforms into an array of colourful blooms is just the icing on the proverbial cake. Its all the motivation I need to get out into the garden and start working.

The house my partner and I recently moved into has two large magnolia trees in the garden. As someone who is pretty passionate about having a predominantly Australian native garden I had considered replacing them. But the first spring they bloomed was all the convincing I needed to let them stay. They couple of weeks of colour the bring is more than worth it. This year when it came time for them to bloom I was inspired to use it in a cake somehow.

I didn’t exactly have an occasion to bake for, so I went for a simple enough sponge that I could send with Cam on the train into work.

I started with a basic sponge, baked in two separate springform tins to make levelling much less of a chore later.

In between those I layered it with a raspberry white chocolate cream. The cake was going to be at room temperature for a long time, so I wanted something that was stable. You could of course leave out the white chocolate if you don’t want such a stiff filling.

While they were baking I got to making the magnolia flower. I used a rose petal cutter as a base and then thinned the edges out into a more magnolia shape. I didn’t want to put any wire or inedible components in a cake made for a work crowd, so all the petals were sculpted and left to dry individually. This definitely made for a harder assembly later and required a lot of pre-planning when shaping the petals.

I used a combination of paintbrush and airbrush to paint the petals and stamen. Then I glued them to each other using royal icing.

It took me so long to make the flower and almost all the detail was hidden, so have another gratuitous photo of it.

The rest of the cake I covered in a swiss meringue buttercream. I had a tiny amount of buttercream left at the end, so I tinted it purple and decided to have a go at patterning the icing with a scraper.

I’m pretty fond of sharp-edged cakes and even more so ones that leave the fondant behind. I’d like to spend a lot more time practising this instead of relying on fondant for a clean exterior.

The cake was very well received. Cam alleviated my nervousness about serving cake to a new social crowd by texting me the kind reactions all day.

Here’s the recipe for the sponge itself.