Happy 4th of July!

 lemon chiffon petal cake

 crumb layer

red, white & blue frosting

8 layers!

I've been dying to try this petal decorating style on a cake ever since I saw it on the i-heart-baking blog. So, for 4the of July I decided to make a lemon chiffon cake and decorate it "petal-style" with red, white and blue frosting. I found this lemon chiffon cake recipe online a couple of years ago and it's so light and yummy.

First I made the cake (four 8" round cakes) and cut each cake in half to create 8 layers. I used a cream cheese whipped cream frosting and put a thin layer of frosting between each layer. Then I put a thin layer of frosting over the entire cake to create the crumb layer. I put the crumb layered cake in the fridge while I separated out the frosting, colored the red and blue and put them into piping bags. Then it was time for the fun part...decorating!

To make the petals you pipe dots in a single column and then smear the dot from the center. Here's a great tutorial on how it's done. This process does take some time but my husband helped me speed up the process. I piped and he smeared. We found that once you've established the first few columns, it is faster to do the entire row(s) of the one color at time, instead of going down each column. This makes it much easier because you don't have to take as much time cleaning off the spreader used to smear the dots (minimizing color contamination).

Overall the cake turned out really well. I do need to work on the spacing between petals and I think next time I'll use a buttercream frosting for the petals instead of a whipped cream based frosting.  This should make it look a little more clean...but I just love whipped cream! So, it might look better with the buttercream but I'm not sure if it'll taste as good.

Hope you all had a wonderful 4th of July!