camouflage rose birthday cake - vanilla cake filled with lilikoi cream

For my husband's birthday this year, I made another camouflage inspired cake (surprise surprise!), as I typically do every year. I had recently been experimenting with multi-colored piped roses while making a unicorn cake for my daughter's birthday, so I thought for hubby's birthday it would be fun to do multi-colored piped roses in camouflage colors!

My husband is from Hawaii, so lilikoi (passionfruit) is a favorite flavor of his. On my mother-in-law's last visit, she had brought fresh lilikoi pulp, which she had frozen, seeds and all. So I decided to use a bit of this in his birthday cake!

After baking up two 6-inch round vanilla cakes (recipe in my book, The Hello Kitty Baking Book), I let them cool and then sliced them in half horizontally, giving me four cake layers. Then I made a small batch of fresh whipped cream, sweetened with powdered sugar and a bit of vanilla extract, and added several tablespoons of the strained lilikoi pulp (seeds discarded). I also brushed each cake layer with a bit of lilikoi juice, just to amp up the lilikoi flavor, before filling it with the lilikoi whipped cream.

Once the cake was filled and assembled, I used whipped up a batch of buttercream frosting to cover the top and sides of the cake. (Just a quick crumb coat - at this point it didn't have to be perfect, since I would be covering it with piped roses later on.)

Then I tinted a third of the remaining frosting brown, a third green, and left the final third white. I used a bit of each color to fill my piping bag, which was already fitted with a large star tip.

Then I proceeded to pipe rosettes along the sides of the cake.

I finished by piping rosettes to fill the top of the cake as well, and filled in the gap with little swoops and curls.

I thought it turned out pretty cute!





And I could definitely see myself doing the multi-colored rosettes in a variety of colors!

Happy Birthday, my love! Hope you enjoyed your cake! :)