I have a question about cake fillings. I'm making a white cake(DH doesn't care for chocolate) and I would like to use something besides buttercream frosting between the the layers. Since this is my first cake should I just use the buttercream that I'm going to crumb coat it with(covering it in fondant) just to make it easier on myself or take the risk and use a different filling? I'm thinking a fruit filling like raspberry or lemon but I don't have any good recipes for fillings. This is my first attempt at cake baking and I'm just not sure if I'm biting off more then I can chew by doing a different filling. Any tips or suggestions welcomed! Thanks!

Becky

You can certainly use a filling. Sure, buttercream would be easier (and is what I normally do), but there are tons of free recipes on this site. There's a recipe tab at the upper left of each screen and you can do a search for just fillings.

Be sure to pipe a stiff buttercream dam around to hold the filling in. If you don't, you'll have filling running into the outside and it will be messy. I assume you are practicing on family, so why not go for it?

Seedless raspberry jam or lemon curd makes a great filling. Like JammJenks said pipe a dam first. There may be a video on youtube about piping a dam, it's not hard. Go for it!!

If you're not feeling terribly ambitious (and to save yourself from feeling overwhelmed, this being your first cake). Separate some of the buttercream you are already using and flavor that for the filling. You can flavor it with jam/jelly, fruit purees, nut pastes (peanut butter or nutella are great), melted cooled chocolate, extracts, oils... the list goes on an on. As I said this might be a more manageable option for you, since you're already making the buttercream

I could be off base here, but I would pipe the dam anyhow, so you don't get the flavored BC seeping out into the icing....although don't know if it would matter as much as something like jam or fruit seeping out...I always play it more conservative, and I'm no expert, so see what the pros say...

It is preferable that your dam is stiffer than your regular frosting. So yes, you would still need the dam for a buttercream based filling. Just thicken up some of you frosting with more powdered sugar and use that for your dam.

if you're doing a buttercream cake, then yes you want the dam, so that the colored filling doesn't contaminate the crumb and possibly outer coating. When I do a fondant cake, I don't bother doing a separate dam when filling with any kind of buttercream. I don't make my dam BC any stiffer than the rest either--I use primarily meringue based buttercreams, so they are what they are (i.e., nothing to add to stiffen without changing the flavor) so when I do use a dam, it's the same consistency BC as the rest of the cake.

And yes, you can use lorann oils, or any other extracts or flavoring compounds to flavor your basic buttercream... experiment and try different things. You can flavor BC with just about anything!

Here's google doc that was created from a thread here called "Gourmet Flavors" If you search for gourmet you should be able to pull it up. It can't have gone too far down

There are some great ideas for fillings and flavorings in here.

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=df4f9hbq_46cs9f28fs