A Spring B'day for my buddy!

It's a beautiful day today. Yes, a lovely 78F as I write this, no not fooling ya (as it's April Fool's day too today) and I'm just so blogging happy about that :-) We went for a lovely walk in the evening and Appu happily exclaimed "Mummy, you are not wearing jacket!!" I just love days like this and can't wait for more jacketless days.
I just took an unexpected break from blogging the entire past month for no particular reason, but I have to say the extra 'me' time felt very good....March flew by in a blink and trust me so will April.

As always March 29th turned out be a a very special and beautiful day, hubby darling turned a year older and it's been 3 glorious years in our lovely home. I baked and decorated a spring themed cake for hubby dear and planned for a fun potluck with our closest friends.
Climate-wise it was a bit cold so couldn't plan any outdoor activities, so we enjoyed indoors with the warm company of our friends, awesome food, wine and a fruity colorful cake.

Spring is round the corner and I'm jolly excited about it. I have always wanted to try making a Spring themed cake with some new buttercream decorating techniques and also try my hand at baking a citrusy Lemon cake for so long and Manish's b'day seemed a perfect occasion to try that out. Another thing I've wanted to try was fruit curd.....so ta-da, all in one....Lemon Cake with a tangy-sweet Mango curd filling and Yellow ombre buttercream sides with sunflowers and roses to symbolize the beginning of colorful Spring.
As the cake turned out too flowery for a guy I promised Manish a 'man-ish' cake next year...like a burger cake or beer cake or something non-flowery :-P :-P

I'll share an entire detailed post of the cake explaining how to make a layer cake, crumb-coating and of-course the recipe in my next blog post.....for today I'm just sharing these snaps.

The kids were having a blast in our basement and did not bother to come up for cake cutting! Appu sent his spiderman toy with a friend who went to call the kids saying spider-man represented him...oh well! :-) But we managed a quick pic after cake cutting while he came up to check what we were upto and ofcourse, for his share of cake...hehe!

The response for the cake flavor was mixed, some of our friends really enjoyed the refreshing citrus flavored cake, while others weren't a fan of it though they agreed that the cake was really good and they all loved the roses and sunflowers. Manish and I personally loved the cake flavor and even my colleagues enjoyed it when I took some to office but in all it was certainly a new flavor from the usual chocolate or vanilla flavors.

So more in my next blog post, which will be more fun with more cake pictures and detailed tutorial on how I made this cake with recipe et all....

-Manju