Fuchsia Gerbera Daisy Cake

This is another version of the cake I fell in love with on www.pinkcakebox.com. You can click here to see the first one I did, which was also my first fondant cake and featured peachy-pink flowers. This is my fourth try at covering a cake in fondant, but I'm still not sold on it. I guess I just need more practice before I can be comfortable with the whole process.

The cake is three, 1-inch layers of German chocolate cake. I made a traditional cooked filling with coconut and pecans. The outside of the cake was frosted with chocolate frosting I made from Ghirardelli sweetened chocolate powder, then it was covered in vanilla fondant.

The "pearls" around the border and the green stems are both made of hand-rolled fondant. The flowers are gum paste. The fondant for the stems was colored with Americolor Electric Green. I used a little bit of Americolor Fuchsia to color the fondant that covers the cake. I added a little more color for the lighter flowers and then added a bit more for the darker flowers.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions about the techniques I used to make this cake.

Autumn-Inspired Birthday Cake

This is another cake that I made for a coworker's birthday. Gum paste is a new medium for me, so I wanted to try something new.

I used a cookie cutter for the small oak leaf. The other leaves were hand cut from a template. I found the clip art from Microsoft Office Online. (I love free stuff!) To make the leaves dry in a natural looking state, I crumpled up several foil sheets and layed them on a cookie sheet to create a very uneven surface. I cut out the leaves, used a ball tool to thin the edges on a foam sheet, then used a veining tool to create the veins. Then I creased them down the center and kind of folded the leaves along the veins then layed them in various positions on the foil hills and valleys. When they were dry enough to handle, I used a dry paintbrush to add gold and bronze lustre dusts to them. The leaves actually started out as vibrant shades of red, red-orange, and yellow. The lustre dusts softened the colors.

The cake is a 9", triple layer carrot cake, baked from scratch; filled and iced with an old fashioned, homemade cream cheese frosting - lots of buttah! Paula Deen would be proud. Based on techniques I've seen in Serious_Cakes' videos on YouTube, I used a #104 tip to stripe the sides and then I used a #18 star tip to create a seashell and C-scroll border around the bottom. I used the reverse shell technique (kind of) to form the border around the top of the cake.

I wasn't at work Monday because I was attending the local ICES Day of Sharing, which means I wasn't there when the cake was cut. But there was a little bit left Tuesday morning, so we enjoyed it for breakfast! Yummy in my tummy!