Cake Decorating Ideas

First Name: Diane
City-State: Lebanon, PA

This cake was made for my co-worker’s 50th Birthday party. She presented me with a picture of what she wanted. In the picture all the flowers were made of buttercream, but I wanted to see if I could challenge myself to do them all in gumpaste. Gumpaste is a sugar-based “dough” that dries very hard. The flowers can be saved indefinitely in a cool dry place. In fact, Jane told me she wanted to get one of those dome-shaped cases to display the topper.

The cake is a two-layer 12″ cake on the bottom and 8″ on top. It is white almond sour cream cake with chocolate chips. The recipe is from the website cakecentral.com. (That website has lots of ideas and pictures for inspiration.) The outside frosting is standard buttercream in a basket-weave pattern. It is filled with chocolate syrup frosting in the middle. This is such a yummy combination of flavors!

The gumpaste flowers were very time-intensive. I think I made over 100 flowers, and almost as many leaves. The roses, for example, were cut petal by petal, then formed one at a time around a wire wrapped with florist’s tape. Some flowers like the daisies, were cut with the flower cutters in Wilton’s kit and simply attached together. The kit gives instructions and pictures and was very helpful. I haven’t had any formal training – just looking at cake decorating books.

Flowers wrapped in florist’s tape or any other wire cannot be inserted directly into a cake for food-safety reasons. I used several straws about 3″ long pushed into the cake in between the tiers. Then the flower wires can be trimmed and inserted.

I was very pleased with the results, and Jane said everyone loved it. So it’s the feeling of satisfaction that makes all those hours of flower-making worthwhile.