Step 1: Pick some flowers from your garden. (Note: daffodils are poisonous, as are many other flowers. Don't eat the poisonous ones.) Be grateful for the gardeners before you who gifted you with daffodils, and be pleased that the tulips you planted two years ago actually came up again. Tulips are not known for being reliable that way.
Step 2: Bake a white cake in the daisy pan, let cool, and then carefully cut the center out.
Step 3: Gently transfer white daisy cake to the pretty silver tray your mother-in-not-quite-law recently passed down to you. (Feel free to use any other serving device at hand. :-)
Step 4: Bake a yellow cake in whatever vaguely reasonable pan you've got (mine was a 9x12). Ideally you should let cool, but I was getting a little tight on time, so I didn't. Cut out a circle the right size. If you try just putting the extra circle of cake on top, you may find, as I did, that the two cakes stick together. A glass would probably work better. Especially if you let the cake cool first. Did I mention the importance of letting it cool?
Step 5: Dig out your lemon curd. (Of course you have lemon curd on hand. Otherwise, what would you do the next time someone showed up with fresh-baked scones? Hopefully you also have ginger marmalade, although you will not need it for this recipe. But it is yummy.) This one, from Elizabethan Pantry, has a nice picture of the Queen on it, particularly appropriate since the royal wedding was this morning.
Step 6: Slather lemon curd on the inside and outside of the cake. Not the bottom. Ignore the small child who pipes up that she wants to 'help'. Tell her to go watch her brother -- that that is the best way to help mama right now. Sprinkle some white sanding sugar over the top, just to check that this is actually going to work. It seems good. Whew.
Step 7: Carefully insert yellow cake into white cake. Hmm....that doesn't seem so impressive. Wonder if it was actually worth the bother of making two cakes at all. Sigh. Use a little ready-made lemon frosting (that you bought for no good reason that you can now think of) to try to disguise the seam, and then realize that it would have worked much better just using more lemon curd. Oh well.
Step 8: Sprinkle generously with lots and lots of sanding sugar. Decorate with daffodils from your garden. (Try the tulips first, and decide they don't work well at all. Abandon them.) See -- now you can call it a daffodil cake, as originally promised. Serve with the fresh lemon sauce you made Kevin make for you the night before. (Okay, if you don't have a Kevin, you can make it yourself. But I really do recommend making some, as it brings a fresh, bright note to the cake that is particularly helpful when you're using store-bought mixes. Also, it looks pretty.) After I took this photo, I also added some thin slices of fresh lemon as decoration, which made it look even prettier.
Step 9: Call small child back in and tell her it's her turn to decorate her very special square cake. (The leftovers from the little circle of yellow cake you cut before. Any extra bits, eat now.)
Step 10: Praise child for her decorating skills.
Step 11: Take both cakes to party, and serve, being grateful that your friend is exactly the sort of person who will exclaim in delight over a flower-bedecked cake on a silvery tray, and will not think you're a pretentious git. Be relieved when guests cut into the cake to discover that actually, it does look kind of cool, having that yellow cake at the daisy's center. All right then. That was fun.
Step 12: Take leftover cake home afterwards. Eat cake for a week!