Retro birthday cake

I love it when people ask me to make something and don't give me any instructions what so ever on flavor or decoration. I get to make whatever I feel like making.

And this is what I felt like making. Although my sister only asked for one cake to me it didn't feel like a party with only just one cake so I decided to make a two layered one.

I wanted to make the top layer with chocolate biscuit and fill it with some chocolate butter cream, raspberry jam and ganache and the second layer would be an orange biscuit with an orange curd, apricot jam and some "bokkenpootjes" butter cream.

I started with baking the biscuit for the two cakes using 1,5 of the biscuit recipe. For the first batter I added quite some cocoa powder. I didn't know that normally you would substitute 10% of the flour with cocoa powder so I added about 3-4 tablespoons of cocoa powder. It turned out just fine so no worries.
For the second layer I added some orange zest to the batter. 

Then when the cakes were cooling down I started to make the first batch of butter cream. For the chocolate butter cream I added 200 grams of melted pure chocolate to the basic butter cream. For the ganache I used equal parts of whipping cream and chocolate. For the sugar syrup I used equal parts of water and sugar and I added a dash of amaretto liqueur. 

I made the orange curd the day before using my lemon curd recipe:
- 300 ml fresh orange juice
- 1 teaspoon orange zest
- 2 eggs
- 2 egg yolks
- 100 gr room temperature butter
- 100 sugar
- pinch of salt

Unfortunately the curd wasn't as smooth as I hoped. So I poured the mixture back in the pot and heat it all up again. Then I added 2 tablespoons of custard powder and let it cook for a couple of minutes. So instead of orange curd I ended up with some orange crème pâtissière which was even better. 

The second batter of butter cream I mixed 1/3 with some crushed bokkenpootjes and to 2/3 I added 3-4 tablespoons of orange crème pâtissière.

When the cakes cooled down I cut them in 3 layers each. Each layer of the cake got sprinkled with some sugar/amaretto syrup to keep them moist. 

The first layer on the chocolate cake was raspberry jam. And on top of that a thin layer of chocolate butter cream. Then the next layer was chocolate ganache and a thin layer of chocolate butter cream. Then the whole cake was covered in chocolate butter cream. 

The orange cake had a first layer of thinly spread apricot jam, orange crème pâtissière and a thin layer of orange butter cream. The next layer was a thin layer of orange crème pâtissière and some bokkenpootjes butter cream. Then the whole cake was covered in orange butter cream. Both cakes went into the fridge till the butter cream was hard. 

I used 1 kilo of white marshmallow fondant and 250 gram of purple fondant for the decoration. For the top cake I didn't had a paper cake bottom as it would be stacked on top of the other cake, but next time I would use one. It will keep the two part separated while cutting the cake. 

Both cakes were transported separately and stacked together on site. Too bad the light was horrible for the last picture, but everyone loved the cake!