Time to move on to the lavender rose petal cake. The filling for this cake is rose lavender chamomile mousseline. Mousseline means pastry cream with lots of butter beaten into it. Melt in your mouth delicious.

I decided to use an Italian Buttercream frosting (Italian meringue, with lots of butter beaten into it). However, I wanted it to taste like roses, so I pulled a jar of my homemade burgundy-colored rose petal syrup out of the freezer and heated it to soft ball to beat into the white Italian meringue. I actually had to call Dave over to watch this because I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. As I poured the deep red syrup into the glistening white meringue, the meringue turned bright green, right before our eyes.

It took a LOT of red food coloring to bring it to this shade of pink.

My friend, Coral, at The Berry Man offered me a bottle of intensely fragrant organic rose syrup to try as an alternative to rose water. (Rose water didn’t turn the frosting as green, but it didn’t add much fragrance.) Coral’s syrup folded into the buttercream at the end, gave the frosting a delightful fragrance without the intense green coloring… the light yellow green tinge was easily converted to pink with a much smaller amount of food coloring.