purple ombre petal cake with chocolate butterflies for mother's day

My mom likes desserts that are not too sweet.  And, she loves lemon.  So for Mother's Day I decided to make her a lemon blueberry cake, with purple ombre petal frosting for a girly feminine touch.

Initially I was going to make a lemon cake with blueberries in the batter itself, but last minute I decided to just make it a lemon cake, filled with blueberry whipped cream.  I had been eyeing a recipe for "hot milk cake" in my copy of "Miette" by Meg Ray; it sounded interesting because it was the total opposite of any other cake recipes I had tried.  While usually I would combine the fat with the sugar and then add eggs, and then alternate a flour mixture with milk, this recipe called for beating eggs with sugar, then adding the flour, then melting butter with hot milk, which is then poured into the cake batter at the end.  Interesting!  I wanted to try it.  The only thing I changed was adding lemon zest to the batter, to give a nice lemony flavor to the cake.

The blueberry filling was fairly simple - I whipped heavy cream with a bit of confectioner's sugar and vanilla, and when it started forming stiff peaks I added a few tablespoons of pureed blueberries (blueberries that I had pulsed in the food processor), and then whipped it a bit more to incorporate.

For the frosting, I wanted a light frosting that wasn't too sweet, so I chose this swiss meringue cream cheese frosting at 6 Bittersweets - I've been wanting to try her recipe, and it sounded perfect with the lemon and blueberry combination.  But I must have done something wrong, because my frosting came out very loose.  I tried refrigerating it for a while and then rebeating, but this only lead to clumpy not-smooth frosting.  But I was running out of time, and besides it still tasted great, so I used it anyway.

I piped a border of frosting on the perimeter of my first layer of cake, so that the soft filling would not leak out.  Then I filled it with the blueberry whipped cream, and then topped it with my second layer of cake.  After a quick crumb coat of frosting, I began the fun part of creating the petal look of the frosting.  I found this great tutorial at Hungry Housewife, which shows you step by step how to create the petals.

I also made chocolate butterflies for the finishing touch!  I found a great tutorial here.  Initially I was going to make the butterflies purple, but since the top of my ombre cake was purple in the middle, I decided to just make them chocolate so that they would stand out.

When we cut into the cake, the inside looked so pretty with the purple and lemon yellow constrasting colors!  The cake was nice and lemony, but very very dense, and tasted almost like a lemon pound cake.  But the overall combination of lemon and blueberry flavors was nice.

Happy Mother's Day, Mommy!