Mom's Birthday Cake

For her birthday yesterday, my mother asked for a simple, moist white cake. Since I usually refuse to use a cake mix, though my mother does like them, we settled on a one bowl white cake I have made before. It has a pretty good flavor and is fairly moist. It is also a very firm cake and is very easy to decorate. 
My mother also prefers my father's "margarine milk" icing to my buttercream icing. She often finds my buttercream icing too sweet and rich (which is why I love it so much). My buttercream icing uses a large proportion of butter, along with icing sugar and milk. My father's margarine milk uses just a little margarine, along with a lot of icing sugar and milk.  This is another reason I needed a sturdy cake, margarine milk is either made quite runny or too stiff to spread on a delicate cake. So I got my father to make his margarine milk icing and completely fill and frost the cakes for me. As I had expected, margarine milk icing is not as easy as buttercream icing to spread and frost cakes, which is another reason I prefer buttercream. Margarine milk just does not achieve the same fluffy texture as buttercream, so it is either too runny and runs off the cake, or is too stiff and tears the cake. It seemed to spread pretty well on these cakes though, which was good. Then I used my usual buttercream icing for the piping, flowers, and decorations, because buttercream is much easier to pipe.
For the piping decorations, I used some pastel pink, because it is my mother's favorite color. I paired it with some pastel blue lettering, and some green for the leaves and stems of the leaves. I searched and looked at a lot of buttercream flower decorating ideas online, and practiced some, drew some out, and tried to decide which ones I liked the best. I find cake decorating goes better if you have a plan of what you are doing. Of course you can never really fully decide until you are in the process, and then you may discover that some decorating techniques won't work on your cake. For example, when I was trying to decide what techniques to use on this cake, I ruled out flowers going up the sides of the cake, because the cake was not high enough to do this. I also ruled out two borders and just made one. I ruled out certain types of piped flowers because I can't do them well (I'll keep practicing). That's why I shied away from buttercream roses, they don't turn out the greatest, especially on hot days.
I finally settled on piping some sweet peas, which are basically half roses, as a border around the top edge of the cake. These are made by using the same tip as for buttercream roses, and basically making three flat petals. I spaced them out, and used my leaf tip to pipe some leaves attached to them and a vine going around the edge of the cake. Next I piped the lettering. I am practicing my own writing, so I did not use the fancy lettering press I have. It also would have been tricky to use this in a circle, as I did here. I did this not only to make room for the flowers in the middle, which I wanted to be the focal point of the cake, but also because I wanted to practice this. This is a good technique to master as well. To finish, I piped several drop swirl flowers in the middle of the cake. I like to refer to these as pansies, and they are an easy alternative to roses. They use the same tip, but you do not need a flower nail to make these, you can pipe them directly on the cake. I used my leaf tip to add the centers of the flowers (a plain open tip would have worked, but why change tips if you don't really need to?). Then I added some leaves as well. My mother loves flowers, she loves pink, so I just made a simple flower themed cake with a lot of pink. I knew she wouldn't want the cake overdone or too fancy. 
Happy Birthday Mom!