Daring Bakers - Dorie's Perfect Party Cake

March brought me my second challenge as a Daring Baker... in the form of CAKE!

Ahahaha I heart cake. And we were allowed to make a ton of modifications with regards to flavor and such - fun times. The original recipe was a lemon flavored cake with lemon flavored buttercream and raspberry jam. Many of the Daring Bakers chose to make the recipe as it was written, and all of their cakes looked delicious, so I'm sure I'll try it that way sometime in the future.

But when I made the cake, I had a ton of blueberries lying around and no raspberry jam! I actually consume a pretty inhuman amount of raspberry jam daily, so naturally my jar was nearing empty on cake baking day... So, out came the blueberries. And because there were blueberries, I really just couldn't resist adding cinnamon.

Well, it doesn't look much like any of the refined, beautiful party cakes that the other Daring Bakers made... First, I didn't exactly have a 'party' to bake for, so I halved the recipe. Hence, 2 layers instead of 4. Also, I kind of ran out of buttercream (next time I'll make a double recipe) halfway through. But, when you have as much blueberry amazingness as I did, who needs frosting on top of a cake? Not me. I just poured and poured and poured with the blueberries. Yum.

Apart from not having enough buttercream, I was pretty impressed with this recipe - the cake was nice and fluffy and was good at soaking up blueberry juice (hehe), and the buttercream was divine (lemony and cinnamon-y oh my!). This turned out to be a nice breakfast cake, actually... yeah, I had some for breakfast 3 mornings in a row. So, next time I have an actual party to bake for, I'm excited to try the unadulterated recipe and see how it turns out! It was a wonderful challenge from a wonderful hostess, Morven! Check out her blog for the recipe!