Best Celebration Cake - Take 2

Last weekend was my Mother-in-law's birthday, which, as usual, snuck up on Hubby and I without warning.  We went down to northern NSW for her birthday party - a BBQ at their home.  A BBQ with my parents-in-law is no ordinary affair, after all, my Father-In-Law is a chef and seems to love putting on an awsome spread.

My contribution to the cause was to take down a birthday cake for MIL.  What cake?  Well, to be honest, it was an excuse for me to have another go at smitten kitchen's gorgeous yellow cake.

Despite a momentary set back when I realised we didn't have any caster sugar (thank you neighbours!), preparing the cake went much more smoothly this time around.  Taking my lessons from my first attempt, I didn't overfill the cake pans this time and I also baked them separately.  I still felt like they would NEVER ACTUALLY FINISH baking though... but it's funny what an extra five minutes will do, and soon I had two round cakes and six cupcakes (I had to do SOMETHING with the extra batter) cooling on a rack.

Can I say now, that I am absolutely addicted to the dark chocolate and sour cream icing?  Honesty, it's icing for grown ups in that you get the full chocolate hit without the icing being overbearingly sweet.  Once the icing was ready, I trimmed up the cakes and set to icing them.

This time round I put much more icing between the cakes (that was a bit of a fail last time), and put a thin coat all over the cake, left it for a moment to 'set' and then put another coating over the top.  It worked a treat and looked far more polished this time than last time around.  Perhaps I'm getting the hang of this icing lark?

It traveled fairly well down the coast in a plastic container (Hubby even put a seat belt round the container so it wouldn't move in the car, and I maneuvered the window shade over the top to keep the sun off).

After dinner I finished it off with crumbled up flake and a few sparklers in place of candles - VOILA!