Happy Sunday! Today I'm actually writing to you from Washington while I visit cousins and have a teeny vacation seeing the sights up here. I mention this because this weeks cake was for this trip! An early Happy Mother's Day cake!

Now I know it looks quite complicated but, in fact, it was fairly easy! I started out with a 6 inch vanilla cake that was about 3 inches tall. I then frosted it with a bit of blue buttercream..yup, blue. I didn't want white poking out between the leaves and liked the blue as a background for the green.

Then I started on the leaves while the cake settled out. I used a medium leaf cutter and thinly rolled out fondant that had no tylose added to it. I wanted the leaves to taste really good, like fondant candy, and tylose can change that taste. I then used two different texturing tools to create the "veins" on the leaves. Lastly I put about 30 of them onto a petal drying stand. This stand looks like white plastic waves and is for drying flower petals for cakes. I let those dry overnight. Those were for the crown of the cake and had veins on both sides.

The next day I started out with a ring of flat leaves going around the top rim of the cake. Then I place the crown leaves with royal icing. Then I continued with flat leaves all in rings all the way to the base of the cake. The left over crown leaves were used to make the raised center on the top and I used more flat leaves to trim the bottom, letting them drop over the sides of the cake stand in the process. I used royal for attaching all of it so the leaves would go on solidly and not move. 

The last step was trimming with the royal icing. Just a ring around the top and then the simple addition of the royal icing dot flowers and all I needed to do was add the pearls and the cake was done. I wanted a showpiece type of cake for this early Mother's Day surprise and I think I managed to get it!

We are off to Seattle today but I will have more photos from our Mother's Day at home to share next week...including showing off the new little mini cake stands I just picked up for my collection! See you next Sunday!

Cat