Pink Champagne Cake

I recently had one of my younger sisters over for the night.  Being the cool big sister that I am (right...) we baked a cake since there's really not much else to do at my apartment.  We settled on a pink champagne cake.  

The recipe was pretty simple- you start with a box cake mix and add champagne instead of water.  What I had forgotten was just how pathetically thin the layers of a box cake end up being.  Instead of settling for a squat cake I made another batch but decided not to color it pink. In the end, I'm really glad it happened that way because it looked really cool.

Although I didn't realize it at the time, the icing was just a glorified butter cream recipe with champagne instead of water or cream.  When I iced this cake I was frustrated that it didn't crust- only later did it dawn on me that butter cream crusts because of the meringue powder.  I used pureed strawberries as a filling between the layers and iced it with the champagne butter cream.  My sister was very interested in how roses were made, so I decided to make more mini roses and use them on the cake.  I had just learned how to do reverse shells in a cake class so I tried those as well. As seen in the picture I have some work to do, though in my defense, the icing was almost too thin to hold its shape.

In the end, I really liked this cake.  I brought it home when I dropped my sister off and everyone was very approving.  Next time I'll definitely use meringue powder in the butter cream and concentrate a little harder on my shells.
-Beth