Angel food cake with lemon curd cream

I have a tradition that all of my friends get a home made birthday cake, so for my friend Rosies birthday I decided to do something rose related. I hate rose water, cannot stand anything rose flavoured, so it was going to have to be rose related in decoration only!

Having never made sugar flowers before I decided I should give it a go and they turned out ok. I didn't have any petal cutters or tools so they weren't perfect and the petals could be thinner but i'm happy enough for a first try.

 I used a powdered food colouring for tinting the pink roses which is great as it doesn't add liquid to the icing so it stays really workable and sets hard, for the leaves though I used a gel colour and it didn't really work as well, the colour wasn't great and it made the icing so sticky and it didn't set- need to invest in more powdered food colourings!

For the cake I decided to try a new recipe, I've always loved the look of american Angel food cakes, they always look so light and fluffy, with an added bonus of being relatively low fat as they are made from predominantly egg whites, no butter or yolks in sight (just a lot of sugar, but still). Not that cake being low fat is ever a concern for me.

I didn't realise how much cake the recipe would make, even in two cake tins it was overflowing, I never thought i'd be hoping for a cake to collapse a bit.

Due to the high egg white content the cake is really meringue like in texture, so its really important to let it cool gradually in the tin, which was difficult cause I was impatient to see what it was like. But it turned out nicely.

For the frosting I wanted to make something pretty rich due to the lack of butter in the cake itself, so decided on a whipped cream frosting. I made some lemon curd (so much nicer than shop bought and surprisingly easy) and then simply folded this into the cream- simple but tasted so good.

And so here is the finished product! I knew I had to carry the cake into town so didn't bother spending time smoothing the cream down etc.

I didn't taste the cake as I brought it to Rosies house and was too interested in red wine than cake, but hopefully it tasted good, I made some pancakes this morning and had the leftover lemon curd with them which made a good hangover breakfast though. Happy Birthday Rosebot. x