Sugar Rose Anniversary Cake

Happy Sunday! Oh, and Happy November and Happy Fall. (Although in many parts of the USA it feels like Winter already!) Today's cake is a special one for a couple celebrating 24 years of marriage. While not a "big" Anniversary they still wanted a very special little cake to share with family and friends. This one is 6 inches by 4 inches and will serve 16 "Wedding Cake" slices. The original colors for their wedding were black, white with touches of pink so that is what the color scheme for this cake ended up being as well.

Close up of Panel

The cake is Mexican Hot Chocolate Cake with Raspberry filling. It's covered in vanilla buttercream because the white buttercream makes for the perfect background for the offwhite flowers. It works as "filler" between the flowers helping to create the look of a full bouquet. The sides are panels of black chocolate fondant that have been marked in a Art Deco type chevron design and then placed on the cake. Now you can measure very carefully and place them one at a time, side by side, onto the cake but this is cake. There is going to be an extra half inch here or quarter inch there that you were not expecting due to cake or crumbcoat thickness, so what I did was to place one chevron panel in the front, then one directly in the back, then one on each side so that the four panels were now fairly equally spaced out. Then I used more chevron panels to fill in the spaces and overlap the panels. Finally the "ribbon" trim went on and bows were attached for added decoration. Then I placed the roses on top. This is much like fresh flower arranging and takes a lot more time than you would think to get the flowers to meet up just how you want them to and look right. You want them to be domed but not too perfect of a half circle. They are supposed to look like real flowers and you can't get a perfect dome from fresh roses.

A word about placing sugar flowers into cakes. Floral wire, often used in the making of sugar flowers, is not food safe. I use those little straw looking coffee stirrers, which are food safe, inserted into the cake first, then slide the wired flowers into the stirrers. This makes sure that the wire is not touching the cake or the frosting.

And finally, these roses are dusted with a sparkly pink luster dust. I didn't try to get the same amount of dust onto each rose but rather dusted them one at a time and let some get a lot of the pink tint and some only get a touch or sparkle. As I mentioned before, these are supposed to look real and the coloring of each rose is never exactly the same as the one it is gathered next to in the bouquet.

Halloween Cupcakes

As I mentioned last Sunday when I posted the other Halloween cupcake order, I had another for Monday, Halloween. These adorable little Jack-o-Lanterns were perfect for the Seniors they were meant to delight! Devils Food Chocolate Cake (perfect for Halloween, right?) topped with lightly tinted orange buttercream and chocolate fondant faces. The green stems are made from tinted vanilla fondant. These were fun to make and even more fun to hand out to the group of Seniors on Halloween Day!

This upcoming week brings mini cupcakes and a mini cake for a little one turning 7 this year. She chose a Halloween theme so I'm not done with the holiday designs quite yet! I'll share those with you next Sunday!

Cat