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.

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.

Garden Party Cake

8" White Cake, buttercream frosting

Techniques Used-swirl star flowers, leaves

Focus-swirl star flowers

This cake idea was in my Wilton Cake Course 1 book, but I don't think it's in print anymore.  When taking the cake class, I found that I really liked doing these flowers.  That's why I decided to try this cake out.  The difficulty with this cake was arranging the flowers, because they were delicate.  I should mention that I made all the flowers first on wax paper a couple days ahead of time.  Anyway, I'm happy with how the cake turned out.

This cake was decorated March 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.