Flower Power Cake

9" White and Funfetti round, Buttercream frosting

Techniques Used-basketweave, rope border, carnation, Wilton rose, swirl star flower, rosebud, vines

Focus-letting someone else design and try out some techniques

While visiting family, my sister wanted to decorate a cake.  I asked her to make a design and then we figured out the finer details.  It turned out pretty much how she designed it, except that we had to change out daffodils for yellow carnations.  On the sides, the front half has vines and little flowers.  The back half is just basketweave.

 It was neat to see how the cake developed.  We started off with making flowers.  The flowers were mainly done by me, but that was mostly because I messed up the batch of frosting, so it was harder to manage.  I put more butter than shortening, and there was more powdered sugar than needed.  Anyway, all it did really was make the frosting more sensitive to temperature than usual, and it was also stiffer than usual.  I also discovered that I don't like how the flowers look when using flower formers. I think the formers are more for apple blossoms and daisies. 

After the flowers, we prepared the cake for decorating.  Part of the design was to have the casually smooth top in the front.  Since an assortment of flowers would be towards the back, we didn't need to casually smooth the entire top.  My sister did the basketweave, and I think she did a pretty good job.

After that, my sister did a rope border on the top and bottom and then we assorted the flowers on top.  We went through a surprising number of batches of frosting.  I think altogether I made 12 cups.  All of it didn't end up on the cake, partly because the frosting was so good that other family members couldn't stop eating it, and it was also the plan to make cupcakes, but we didn't get that far.  What's funny is the rope borders are blue and purple because we ran out of white, so we thought we'd better use up some of the other frosting. 

Next in line was adding the vines.  Once those were in place, we added little pink rosebuds, blue swirl star flowers, and a couple yellow and purple carnations to the vines.  Then there were leaves and the cake was finished. 

This cake was decorated July 2011.