Parsnip, apple and maple syrup cake for Harvest Home Clandestine Cake club event

The theme for this months clandestine cake club is Harvest Home - fruit and vegetable cakes. I enjoy baking with vegetables even the more unusual such as avocado as I appreciate the flavour, texture and moisture they can bring to your cake.

This cake is an easy bake and is already featured on the blog here 

For this cake club I decided to pimp the decoration and also make it a layer cake suitable for the event. Its easy to make a layer cake just carefully slice across your 2 sandwich cakes, hey presto 4 layers. These were then filled with vanilla buttercream and one layer was homemade damson jam and then topped off with spun sugar decorations, the secret to perfect soft fluffy buttercream is to whip the mix for at least 6 minutes and to ensure that the butter is soft before using.

Spun sugar is relatively straight forward to make from sugar melted in a pan, once golden in colour, remove from the heat and stir until you sense some resistance. This is the point you make the shapes you wish, I chose free form shapes. Protect your spun sugar from humidity and only prepare an hour or so before you wish to use it otherwise it melts and goes very sticky.

I had a minor disaster on the way to the venue where the top two layers slid off the two bottom layers, so apologies for the slightly shoddy appearance  As a seasoned cake clubber I am used to this sort of thing happening and managed to arrange a recovery of sorts, the spun sugar decoration were added once I got to the location so survived intact.