My First Wedding Cake!

6" round white cake, rolled buttercream, buttercream frosting, raspberry preserves, strawberries

white cupcakes, buttercream frosting, sprinkles, "C" signs

Techniques Used-quilting, balls, dots, rope border, rosettes, rose (sort of Wilton), spatula striping, spiral cupcake

Focus-decorating 300+ cupcakes!

I have now done a wedding cake, and what a great experience!  It was good to work with someone and see what they wanted and then create it.  There was still a lot of stress and things go differently than I imagined, but I enjoyed seeing this cupcake tower come to life. 

Techniques Used-quilting, balls, dots

 

 

I finally figured out how to make the quilting look professional.  Firstly, I made marks at the top and bottom of the sides of the cake, dividing it like I would if I were doing a basketweave (if looking from eagle view, mark North, South, then East, West, then halfway between each, and then halfway between each once more) to make 16 marks for the top and then the bottom.  Secondly, I used a wooden shish kabob to first line up the top and bottom marks, and then make the diagonal impression.  I found that making the impression before the quilting tool was much better, because then I'm just following the line instead of trying to make my own.  The key to making the quilting look nice is to not "eye" things, but to measure everything, like you would with making a quilt.

Technique Used-spiral cupcake using tip 1M

This is a quick and easy design, and looks pretty nice too.

Technique Used-rope border

Once the cupcake has been frosted, the border is very fast.  I learned that if the cupcakes weren't frosted all the way to the edge, then the rope border will make the edge look clean.  This picture is not one of those examples (you can see frosting underneath the rope border).

Technique Used-rosettes

The nice thing about rosettes is you don't have to frost them beforehand as long as the rosettes are slightly overlapped.  I found that frosting each cupcake doubled or tripled the amount of time spent on each cupcake.  With 300 cupcakes, time is a big deal (3 min./cupcake x 300 cupcakes=15 hours).  Using rosettes made a nice texture change from the other cupcakes.

And last, but definitely not least.....

Techniques Used-Wilton rose (sort of), spatula striping

 

 

I really liked how these turned out.  They brought just enough color to the cupcake tower without being to overbearing.  I wanted to mention why I call this spatula striping and not brush striping.  It has to do with what you use for the striping.  In this case, I made red frosting for the striping, so you would most likely use a spatula to stripe the frosting onto your decorating bag.  For brush striping, you would use straight food color gel and use a brush to stripe it onto your decorating bag.  Compare these pictures with a cake I did using brush striping, and you will see the difference. 

 

 

I liked these cupcakes so much that I took more pictures of them.  The lighting is different, so they look like they are more red-orange than red.  I like how each rose is different, just like if you were to find actual roses, no two would be alike. 

I wanted to mention a few more things about the cupcakes.  For one, I bought undecorated cupcakes and buttercream at Sam's Club.  Each case has 150 cupcakes in them, and the buttercream is a 5 gallon bucket (one bucket is enough for at least 300 cupcakes).  It ends up being about $2.50/dozen cupcakes, but I think it's well worth it.  Could you imagine trying to bake 300 cupcakes in a standard oven, or making all the frosting?  Also, if I were to do cupcakes again, I would know that I need 2-3 days to work on them, because it takes a lot of time and energy to decorate all of these cupcakes.  Transporting them is also a big problem, because I don't have a good way to package them.  I made the rose cupcakes at my home, and a handful of them got damaged along the way.  Right now, it is more realistic to transport a finished tiered cake than finished cupcakes.

This cupcake tower was decorated September 2011.

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.

Majestic Roses II

 

8" round chocolate cake, buttercream and chocolate buttercream frosting, peanut butter fudge filling

Techniques Used-Wilton rose, shell border, leaves

I've done this cake before, but this one is slightly different.  There are two roses in the middle this time, and I used tip 47 for the shell border, instead of the usual tip 21.  I did this because I use that tip for the vertical chocolate lines and I thought it would add uniformity to use the same tip.  I learned with this cake that frosting consistency really matters.  For example, the roses call for stiff consistency, but if it's too stiff (which is my tendency) then the edges of the petals won't be smooth, and they also take longer to pipe out the frosting.  I used to think that roses were a pain because of how long they took.  I think this time I made 20 in about 70 minutes, which I know isn't as fast as professionals, but it's much faster than what I was doing before.

This cake was decorated May 2011.

Rose and Swirl Flower Basketweave Cake

7 1/2" oval spice cake, apple filling, and white buttercream frosting

Techniques used-basketweave, Wilton rose, swirl flower, leaves, rope border

There wasn't a focus on this cake.  I actually only made the roses and flowers of this cake, but I still wanted to post this cake because it's something I can do, and I like the flower arrangement. 

This cake was decorated April 2009.

Roses, Flowers, and Dots Cake

8" round vanilla cake, buttercream frosting, blackberry filling

Techniques Used-Wilton rose, swirl star flower, dots, leaves, shell border

Focus-brush striping

I've always loved the two-tone flowers.  I thought blue would be such a neat color, because it's a color rarely seen in nature, and I wanted a lot of contrast with the white.  Also, I wanted to use a color that tasted good, so red and purple were out of the question.  By the way, there is a shell border underneath the swirl star flowers and leaves, so that they would have something to attach onto.  One more thing, the leftover frosting I had from the roses, I used on the cake, because I made the roses a couple of days ahead, so I mixed the remaining frosting with other white frosting to make this blue color, so there was very little frosting wasted. 

Brush Striping Materials-small brush (used only for food), food gel, frosting, disposable bag, tip

Brush Striping Directions-I'm not really going to go into directions, because I think Wilton does a good enough job and they have pictures of what they're doing.  You can probably find a video on the Internet as well.  However, I will give you some of my tips:

-Use more food gel than you think you need. 

-for roses, make sure the second color is aiming for the pointed part of the tip.

-Do practice roses without the second color.  Once you feel comfortable with making roses, then add the second color.

This cake was decorated May 2009.

Roses, Rosebuds, and Rosettes Cake

8" vanilla round cake, buttercream frosting, apricot filling

Techniques Used-Wilton rose, rosebuds, leaves, rosettes, rope border

Focus-rosebuds, rosettes

I found this design in an older version of Wilton's cake decorating course books, and liked how simple and elegant it looked.  I chose orange for the cake because I hadn't used that color before, nor had I tried mixing colors since starting to decorate cakes.  I think it turned out to be a nice shade of orange, not too bright and not too dull.  The trick is to start out with more yellow dye than red (one horse to one rabbit), and then add a tiny amount of red, if needed. 

I won't go into how to make rosebuds and rosettes because I didn't take pictures of the process, and I think it would be more helpful to have pictures than my description alone.  I know Wilton cake decorating books show how to do these, and I would assume that other cake decorating books would as well.

This cake was decorated October 2009.

Majestic Roses Cake

9" chocolate round cake, buttercream and chocolate buttercream frosting

Techniques Used-Wilton rose, leaves, shell border

I got this cake design from my Wilton Cake Decorating Course 1 book, but unfortunately, I believe it is out of print.  The original design was exactly like this except for one thing-everything was white.  I decided to go with chocolate on white because I thought this same design would look good with the contrast.

This cake was decorated March 2009.