I had a birthday recently and decided to take a break from my Colorado photos to post photos on my cake. If you’ve read this blog before, you know I love cake. Among cake, my true love is buttercream birthday cake. When I get cake in the supermarket, at parties, in the store, it is all with the comparison to birthday cake in my mind.

I grew up in a predominantly Italian town in New Jersey (shocker!). We had a lot of good pizza within 5 minutes and a very special Italian bakery about 15? minutes away. Baldanza‘s is a standalone bakery by a bowling alley on a main road covered with aging stores and strip malls. Despite the raggedy appearance of the area, you smelled this bakery every time you drove by. The scent of baked goods managed to penetrate even your closed windows. It was awesome.

When my mom asked me what I wanted for my birthday, there was nothing on my list, because I generally don’t want a lot, and if I want it, I just get it myself. However, this cake had been in my mind for awhile. I hadn’t had it in maybe 10 years, and now that I had a hobby of photographing food and writing about it, I realized everything was falling short when compared to my beloved Baldanza’s cake.

The first reason I hadn’t had this cake in so long was because, as you may know from my About page, I lost about 100 lbs a few years ago and basically abstained from anything delicious for 5 whole years. (3 to lose the weight, 2 to keep it off.) I’ve since introduced all foods back into my life so this was no longer an issue.

The second reason is that I lived at least 90 minutes from the bakery. My mother had also moved at least 45 minutes away, so I asked her for the cake, but told her not to do it if it would be a pain. As you can see, she came through. She drove down to the Jersey Shore in the wee hours of the morning, picked up the cake, then tried to drive home while holding it in the passenger seat so it wouldn’t fall off and die a tragic death.

The extra variable in this equation is the summer heat. Summer + buttercream = melting cake. She packed cold sodas around it to keep it cool in desperation.

Luckily, it worked! I got my cake, and I was so very excited. As you can see, it is white Italian buttercream, lavender flowers, and lemon filling. Yes, lemon. My many, many cake tastings in the past 5 years have brought me to a very unusual conclusion: I love lemon filling. Not chocolate. Not strawberry. Lemon. Something about the brightness of the taste cuts through the buttercream in the most delightful way.

The icing on this was great. I’ve had many low-quality buttercreams in my life, and that doesn’t even count ‘bettercream’, which isn’t pretending to be the real thing. I’ve even made my own buttercream in search of the perfect icing, and it’s just not the same. I usually make American buttercream, which is just butter+powdered sugar, and this was definitely NOT that. I also suspect it was not French buttercream, which uses egg yolks, because it was so white. That leaves Italian buttercream or Swiss Meringue buttercream. They’re both very similar and basically add corn syrup and egg white. I would guess, since this was an Italian bakery, that they used Italian buttercream, but who knows.

It’s a fork shot! I ate my flower first, and the buttercream tasted as I remembered it; delightfully smooth, sweet, with no taste of butter. My mother detected a hint of rum in it, and I agree that there was more than a vanilla flavoring there. I want to emphasize that it’s not the taste but the mouthfeel and the whole experience. This buttercream might not make you blink until you’ve had so many bad ones, and then you really appreciate it.

More cake shots after the jump.

This shot here is not that great because the cake is a little messy, but I felt I had to show the interior for completeness’s sake. It is a three layer cake with two lemon layers, and the top layer is rounded. I find this very interesting because most bakeries cut the top off the cake to level it. I almost suspect this cake was indeed all one cake, that they just cut up and filled, rather than baking several cakes and stacking them. That’s not a bad thing, and I think using a rounded top on the cake lets you get more icing on the top when you level it, and that is just fine with me.

It has a nice crumb, as you can see. The lemon filling and the buttercream were really the stars here — the cake was just a vehicle, and it did its job. It was moist but not notable.

Sometimes I get questions about my lenses, my photography methods, and whatnot. I thought this would be a good time to talk about how many pictures I take. On one hand, I had to abstain from posting a million photos of the birthday cake because, first, I love cake so all the shots looked good, and, two, none of these shots really jumped out at me as fantastic, so they were all equal candidates.

I’ll usually take 1-3 clunkers, hopefully 3 fantastic shots, and the rest will be simply okay. They’ll be off center, not straight, compositionally boring, or compositionally bad. I’m okay with compositionally bad shots because it usually means I took a risk, like shooting from below or with an odd zoom, and I learned something.

I hate boring shots. They weren’t bad. They might even be good, center, bright, and clear, but they look like anything else in the world. They’re just a waste. Boo.