White chocolate mud cake with Swiss meringue buttercream and rose petals!

In the spirit of baking and what I deemed 'practicing' for making the masterpiece for my daughter's up and coming posh poodle party, I thought I better start trying out cakes to decide what I wanted to use for the cake and perfect my techniques so I am not stressed out with baking disasters on the day!

I am going to be making the FiFi Poodle cake from the Australian Women's Weekly Kid's Party Cake Cookbook.  The recipe says to use two packets of buttercake mix but I was thinking of trying to make my own and make it a bit nicer than a packet cake! I decided that a white chocolate mud cake might be good for the base cake.

There is a great cooking blog that I found awhile ago and I have cooked a lot of different recipes off there and they always work and I find it very easy to follow and usually quick and easy to make.  So I headed over there to Exclusively Food and was pleased to see that they did have a recipe for a white chocolate cake. For the test cake I just made a 20cm springform pan size so used the directions from the pdf at the bottom of the recipe.

For the icing I wanted to try out the Martha Stewart Swiss Meringue Buttercream recipe and just made half the size that the recipe states.

I am an extremely impatient baker at times and everything also is on the run due to constant interruptions by my darling daughter, however I thought that this turned out quite well.  It wasn't quite cooked enough in the middle though when cut open but I was a bit worried about it getting overdone on the edges!  However despite that it tasted delicious!!!   And I really like the icing as well, not too sweet and nice and light.

Any other tried and true recipe suggestions out there for me to try for the cake base?

Swiss meringue buttercream with rose petals

Icing coloured with Wilton gel (pink)

Pariya rose petals