everybody loves Tiffany's

vanilla cake with nutella buttercream
Anthony, a former classmate, and I put this two-tiered fondant-covered cake together for a 30th birthday. A Tiffany's cake is a popular request because what girl doesn't want a special occasion to include one of those beautiful blue boxes? For the filling we made a Nutella buttercream which came out beautifully. Anthony let me keep the leftover buttercream so I can make some Nutella macarons in the near future. OH YEAH.
I've never covered a square cake in fondant before so this cake was a challenge. We decided to cut out pieces of fondant and place them individually on the cake so it looked as much as possible like an actual box. We then used a pasta roller to roll the fondant out to make the ribbons and bows. I piped on the inscription on the gift tag and Anthony added the coup de grace in the form of that beautiful rose.
Below is a picture of the cake before we covered it in fondant. I was in the process of crumb coating it which means covering it in a thin layer of butter cream to create a smooth surface for the fondant to stick to. The cakes were eight and four inches square and both four layers high.


vanilla bean tasting
Anthony ordered three types of vanilla beans---Madagascar-Bourbon, Mexican and Tahitian as pictured below---and wanted me to make ice cream with each kind in order to decide which he liked best. So I did. I froze bite sized portions in a silicone mold and we tried them before we worked on the cake. My favorite was Madagascar which tasted sweet to me, his was Mexican and Chris's was Tahitian. A split decision for sure. What surprised me the most was how small the Tahitian bean was. It also had a distinctively floral taste that I surprisingly didn't like.