CVF 25th Anniversary Cake

Well; River City Treats is becoming more of a catering business with my main focus being on cakes. I've been coming up with a lot of good recipes lately and pulled a Bettany Frankel. I just wish it came with endorsements from Jim Bean :oP I've come up with a very tasty lemonade and am in the process of working on a proposal to supply it on a regular basis to at least one bar! It's a start and tastes great with an ounce of Tequila too (completely optional) - please Jose Cuervo please send your endorsements this way :o) It's even hand squeezed! Good workout for a refreshing result. The last few days I have been working on an anniversary cake for another one of my mom's walking club associations. My third order of the year; I've just been too busy to do much in the line of promos. I think its my best 12X18 cake yet! I even managed to incorporate two recipes to come up with a marble cake. I'm back to using flour and butter to prep my pan and you know what it works; I didn't have enough of the Cake Release I always tout about, but it really worked well, so well I might switch back. Certainly costs pennies versus the container from the store. I made the cake in two batches so the process pretty much took up a good portion of yesterday. I did all the icing and decorating today and only did a buttercream transfer on the Maple Leaf and used gold sparkle gel for the IVV portion. I did, however, try to do something a little different with the 25TH portion that didn't go so well, but I didn't think the sparkle gel alone would show up on the red and thought it would have stood out and wanted something more three-dimensional. Note to self is to not do that again. If it had been hideable I think I would have scraped it off and done somthing completely different with the number. Gold was a key factor in the IVV - I just couldn't get my colours to look gold enough and the other alternative would have been way too much gold edible sparkles - that were the size of raw sugar crystals at the least; I didn't want to cause toothaches and send anyone to have to get dental work after. I know my teeth hurt just looking at them. So yes as I said it was a marble cake and I made fresh chocolate pudding from scratch for the filling. Just a simple buttercream icing with shell border. I had to fix some holes in the transfer and mucked it up when I tried to smooth it out, wasn't such an easy fix afterall it stuck to the gel like mad! I also should have outlined the IVV with some like-colour so it didn't run into a few nooks and crannies where it didn't belong.

All in all I think it turned out well and my mom was quite pleased I would say. I can't wait to hear feedback on the cake. I used my white cake recipe instead of the yellow. The yellow can be very dense and dry sometimes. The white has 8 egg whites so if it isn't moist and fluffy I'll kick myself. I haven't had a dry one yet.