Happy Sunday! This was one of "those" weeks that proves to me that my summer season is definitely here! I had 3 stacked cakes, 5 dozen cupcakes, and 1 birthday cake. Yes, I am exhausted! LOL! So, over the next few weeks I will share all of those with you starting with the Hibiscus cake.

This two tier lemon cake was covered in butter cream and then decorated with hand painted sugar shells and fondant hibiscus petals. The cake itself was the easy part. Baked it, filled it, crumb coated it then put on the finish layer of butter cream and piped the pretty swirls onto it. It is the rest that took the time.

The shells are from plastic molds. You dust the mold with powdered sugar first and then push the fondant/gumpaste mixture into the mold. I let that sit up for about a half hour and then unmold it. Then it has to set up till rock hard for painting. Depending on what your ratio of gumpaste to fondant is you could have to wait a few hours to a few days. The more gumpaste, the faster it hardens up. However, in my opinion, the more gumpaste the worst it tastes so I try to avoid that whenever possible. These were dry after 2 days. Then I used a combination of luster dust and gel colors to get the depth of color for each piece. I painted on a light shade of the pink and then a darker pink shade after that had dried just a bit to give it a water color look. When that was almost dried I dusted with a light pink luster dust and a dark pink luster dust to bring out the texture in each shell.

The flowers are another matter altogether. As a caker you don't always have the perfect tool for the job and have to make do. Now what I wanted was a hibiscus petal cutter but what I had was an azalea cutter:

The one on the right is the one I used to make these petals. I just cut out the shape and then rounded off the tip and used a ball tool to spread it out to look like a hibiscus petal. Then I used a pointed tool to make the marks in the petals. 

At this point I could have shaped the petals and let them set up to dry but I wanted them to be nice and soft for the cake so I carefully placed each petal, overlapping in the center, onto the cake. When both flowers were on the cake I used a #4 tip to make the pistal in yellow and then a #1 tip to make the anthers in orange. 

This is actually a graduation cake but many remarked at the event that it would make a beautiful wedding cake so I decided that tomorrows party plan on the Cherry Party Blog would be a wedding to match this cake! 

Next week is Father's Day! Look here for this years cake as well as those I have done over the past several years! And, as always, check out our Facebook page for daily party tips and crafts!

Cat