Kiley's Butterfly Cake

Our friends, the Taylors, are baptizing their daughter, Kiley, this Sunday.  I am honored to be her Godmother and as such I begged to make her a cake.  Cait, Kiley's mom, picked out the cake design.  Early Saturday morning I baked the cakes.  The bottom layer is strawberry shortcake while the top is chocolate raspberry.  I use Ree Drummond's recipe for strawberry shortcake because it has a nice dense crumb and the filling is fresh strawberries.  The chocolate cake recipe came from Ina Garten.  I am trying this recipe out for the first time.  It has great reviews online.

The chocolate cakes came out nice and moist.  I am pretty excited to try them.  I made them bigger than they need to be for the top layer.  I love baking in square pans.  The cakes seem to always rise more evenly.  I barely need to level the top most of the time.  Usually it's only to make the cake the same height.

Strawberry shortcake layer is ready to be iced.  I am using cream cheese frosting in the middle and buttercream frosting to cover the two layers together.  

The chocolate cake is nice and moist.  I think I found my favorite chocolate cake recipe.  I was a little nervous adding hot coffee to the batter but it worked wonders.  Delicious!  In between the two chocolate cakes I put raspberry jam.  It adds nice flavor and it's not too sweet.

Icing with buttercream took some time but the cakes are finally ready for fondant and stacking.  

Already looking pretty smooth before adding buttercream fondant.

The cake is ready for the final touches.  I made a bow and some butterflies to go on the cake out of fondant last weekend.  It takes a while in humid weather for fondant to harden so I wanted to give it as much time as I could.

The decorations are all edible because they are made of fondant.  I used edible pearl dust on the butterflies to give them a little sparkle.  I cannot wait to share this cake with my Goddaughter and her family.