Sweet Pea Cake

8" round yellow cake, buttercream frosting

Techniques Used-sweet pea flower, shell border, leaves

Focus-sweet pea border

In one of my Wilton books, there is this cake that uses the sweet pea flower for the borders as well as on the sides.  Although this is nothing like the picture in the book, I wanted to try out the sweet pea border.  I chose to do this cake because I only wanted to use one batch of frosting (3 cups).  This flower uses very little frosting, covers quite a bit of space, and makes a unique border. 

 

Since I was trying to stay within 3 cups of frosting, I had to determine the colors I wanted beforehand.  First off, having the cake frosted white meant that whatever frosting was left over could be used for the design.  I didn't measure it, but I think there was 1/2-3/4 cups of frosting left over.  (On a side note, I didn't fill as much between the layers as I normally do, so a good estimate for frosting an 8"x4" round is 2 1/2-3 cups of frosting.)  Secondly, with the flowers being blue, I could add yellow to the frosting once I was done with piping the flowers or vice versa.  I was able to make my goal and had about 1/4-3/8 cups of frosting to spare.

This cake was decorated June 2011.