Brown Butter Pink Ombre Daisy Cake with Strawberry Jam

That title is a bit of a mouthful, I know. But I needed you to know that this is a delicious brown butter cake. Filled with strawberry jam. And it's covered in cream cheese icing piped to look like white daisies. And it's pink on the outside. And ombré! I guess I couldn't help packing lots of my favourite things into one cake. The wordy post title was unavoidable. This cake needed to happen as soon as I thought of it. Dreamt of it actually. I woke up at 4 in the morning with the image of this cake in my mind. I had to make it!

I was in no small way inspired by the mind-blowingly stunning flower cakes that I saw on i am baker (see her hydrangea cake, rose cake, and daffodil cake). I am the first to admit that I completely suck at piping. My attempt at white daisies is not even in the same league. But it will have to do. This weekend was A's sister's birthday and it was the perfect excuse to attempt this cake. She loves cheesecakes so I thought a cream cheese icing would be perfect for this cake. I've been dying to do an ombré icing on the outside of a cake ever since seeing this cake from Apt. 2B Baking Co., followed by Lisa's awesome purple & chocolate version. Originally I was going to use strawberry jam to tint the icing pink, but it made the icing really runny with hardly any colour or added flavour so I gave up and used natural food colouring instead. For the record, I think it's 100 times easier doing ombré icing on a cake than it is to do ombré cake layers and I will definitely be doing it again.

I tried to keep the icing layer really thin so it wasn't too rich or sweet. I really didn't want the icing to overwhelm the flavour of the three layers of beautiful brown butter cake. The smell of brown butter being whipped up with sugar and vanilla bean is unbelievably mouth-watering. The cake batter tasted so divine that I knew this cake would be a winner before I even baked it. The combination of the nutty-flavoured brown butter with the strawberry jam and creamy icing is out of this world.

I know the daisies don't look exactly right, but they're close enough for me. I know you could easily shape flowers using gum paste but I liked the challenge of attempting it with icing. I was just happy to get something that even remotely resembled flowers. I was praying not to end up with a cake that looked like the icing had been flung on to the top of it by a crazed monkey. So...I think, mission accomplished? The easiest way for me to make a petal shape was to piped a blob of icing and then smear the middle of it in a line using a small spatula. I definitely made my petals a bit too indented for daisy petals, but I've never been very coordinated so I didn't have much control over that. And I cheated and used yellow skittles for the centres of the daisies. I really love white daisies, I may have mentioned that before. So I hope you can understand why I didn't have the heart to cut into the top of the cake to give you an innards shot. I just couldn't bring myself to mess up the top of the cake before I got to present it to the birthday girl. Hopefully it will be okay!

Edit: If you realllllyyy want to see the inside you can check out the dodgy Instagram shot I got of the cake while we were demolishing it. It disappeared fast!

Brown Butter Layer Cake with Strawberry Jam & Pink Ombré Daisy Cream Cheese Icing

(makes a three-layer 17cm cake, brown butter cake recipe from Food & Wine)

For the cake:

340g (12oz/3 sticks) unsalted butter, plus more for greasing the pans

285g (2 1/4 cups) plain/all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting

2 1/4 tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

370g (1 2/3 cups) sugar

1 vanilla bean, split and seeds scraped, or 1 tsp vanilla bean paste or pure vanilla extract

3 large egg yolks

2 large eggs

1 1/4 cups milk, at room temperature

About 1/2 cup strawberry jam for spreading

For the cream cheese icing:

500g (about 17.6 oz) cream cheese, chopped

250g (about 8.8 oz) unsalted butter, chopped

3 cups icing sugar, sifted

1 tsp pure vanilla extract

Optional: natural pink food colour

Yellow skittles, to decorate

In a medium saucepan, melt butter for cake. Cook over low heat, stirring occasionally, until foamy, about 5 minutes. Continue to cook, stirring frequently, until the milk solids turn brown and the butter smells nutty, about 4 minutes longer. Scrape the melted butter and browned bits into a large heatproof bowl. Set the bowl in an ice water bath until the butter hardens. Alternatively do what I did and prep the butter ahead of time and chill in the fridge.

Preheat the oven to 165°C (325°F). Butter two or three 17cm cake pans and line the bottoms of the pans with baking paper. (I only had one so I had to bake each cake separately, which did cause the later cakes to be less high but it still turned out okay) Butter the paper and dust the pans with flour, tapping out the excess. Whisk the 2  1/4 cups of all-purpose flour with the baking powder and salt in a medium bowl and set aside. Scrape set brown butter in a large mixing bowl and beat with an electric mixer on high until creamy. Add the sugar and vanilla seeds and beat at medium-high speed until fluffy, about 3 minutes. Beat in the egg yolks followed by the whole eggs. Beat in the dry ingredients and milk in 3 alternating additions, scraping down the side and bottom of the bowl as necessary. Pour the cake batter into the prepared pans and bake in the center of the oven for about 30mins if doing three layers, closer to 40 minutes if only making two, rotating the pans halfway through baking, until the cakes are golden and a toothpick inserted in the centers comes out clean. Cool the cakes in the pans for 10 minutes, then invert them onto a rack to let them cool completely. Peel off the parchment paper.

Remove butter and cream cheese from the fridge 30 mins before starting icing. Place butter in a large mixing bowl and beat butter with an electric mixer on high until smooth and fluffy. Add cream cheese and beat until combined and smooth. With the mixer on low, gradually add icing sugar, add vanilla and increase to high. Beat until light and fluffy. If doing ombré icing, take about 1/3 of the icing, split that icing into two separate bowls and tint one bowl light pink and one bowl a darker pink. Trim any uneven tops off the cake layers. If filling cake with strawberry jam, whisk jam to remove lumps and sandwich between cake layers. Using the white cream cheese icing, crumb coat outside of cake. Chill in fridge for at least 15 mins.

Starting at the bottom, spread the dark pink icing over the bottom third of the cake using an offset spatula. Do the same for the middle third of the cake using the lighter pink icing, blending the two colours where they meet. Spread white icing over the top third of the cake and smooth with spatula. If piping daisies, place leftover white icing in a piping bag with a 0.5cm round tip. Pipe 5cm rings of 1cm dots of icing and then use the tip of a mini spatula or a chopstick to smear each dot of icing to make the petals. Place a yellow skittle in the centre of each piped flower. Chill in the fridge for at least an hour. Remove from the fridge 30 mins before serving. Can be stored in the fridge for a couple of days.