New York Cake

This cake was for someone's going away lunch at work. She recently returned from a trip to New York and talked about how much she loved the city, so it seemed like a safe bet. I wanted to try some chocolate work for this one, and the Whimsical Bakehouse has a great city scene in their book that helped me with the structure and chocolate tips.

The top tier is a double layer 6 inch white cake and the bottom is a double layer 9 inch chocolate cake. Both tiers have cookies and cream buttercream filling (which I should have never tasted--I ate a LOT of the leftovers and think about it every 20 seconds or so since then..it's definitely my new favorite flavor) and the entire cake is covered with vanilla buttercream frosting. The chocolate is mostly just different colors of vanilla bark piped over images I found on the internet.

It was hard to photograph because there is a lot going on all around the cake, but hopefully the idea comes across. The colors of the cake move up from a green to blue to navy/purplish for a night scene. It was time consuming, but not difficult. The biggest issue I had was scale; my first set of chocolate pieces were so large I couldn't use them, so I now have an extra Statue of Liberty in the freezer...