Each year, my birthday gift to myself is to spend the day creating an elaborate, multi-step cake. In 2019 it was this showstopper, in 2018 I spent all day creating this stunner, in 2017 I baked this beauty and in 2016, this was my featured cake.

Baking is my happy place and I love to challenge myself with advanced techniques to create something I have never done before. This vertical stripe cake has been on my list of “must bake” for quite a while now. Cutting into a cake and revealing vertical layers of cake and icing, instead of the usual horizontal, is such an unexpected delight and surprise. There are so few good surprises left in life anymore.

This cake is inspired by the Lemon and Blackcurrant Stripe Cake in Sweet. I could not find black currants, so I used blackberries instead. The berries are used to make a sauce to flavour the buttercream. In the original recipe, they used some of the sauce to create a “drip cake”, but I have never been successful in getting the sauce to drip artistically down the sides. I always make a bloody mess. I decided to just top it with some berries and flowers and use the extra sauce to serve on the side.

The batter for the cake is a light lemon sponge. It’s baked in a jellyroll pan.

Once the cake is baked, let it cool for 5 minutes. Then dust with icing sugar, and cover with a clean towel. Flip the whole thing over, peel off the baking sheet and parchment paper and roll up the warm cake in the towel.

This step “trains” the cake to roll up later without cracking. Once cooled, unroll and cut into three long rectangles.

Spread each rectangle with some of the buttercream. The original recipe called for a French buttercream. This type of buttercream uses egg yolks. I find it a bit too rich for this cake, so I went with a Swiss Meringue Buttercream, which uses just the egg whites.

The three strips of cake are rolled up into one wide barrel. Stand it on its end and you have a vertical stripe cake. You can see in the photo below, where the strips have been joined. Then cover the entire cake in more buttercream.

I created a simple decoration of flowers and blackberries.