A Bunch of Roses

I love making cakes for friends and family, so since my work's Christmas party conveniently coincided with my last Wilton class, I decided to make a cake for the girls to enjoy. And being hard working night-nurses, I thought they deserved something special.

I chose a butter cake that I layered and filled with mango and custard, before covering the whole thing in almond and vanilla buttercream. It was then brought into class to be decorated. We have been practicing making buttercream roses over the last few classes, and this week we finally got to finish them off, and as I love pink, it was an easy task to choose the colour.

We got to choose between a couple of designs involving roses for our cake. I went with a bouquet of three pink roses and added in two small buds, some leaves and a bow to finish it all off. My buttercream had softened a little in my hand, so my roses ended up being a bit more open then originally planned, but since they still looked good, I left them that way.

The cake was a big hit, and I was so happy to see that they all enjoyed eating it.

Thank you to all the fabulous night nurses at Noarlunga Hospital. You do such a wonderful job, and you all deserve a bunch of flowers!

Send in a clown...

One of my goals when I signed up to do the Wilton classes was to be able to do 3D decorations with buttercream. It's great to be able to make edible decorations that actually taste nice, so you don't have to pick things out of your cake to be able to eat it.

For our last November class the project was to make a clown cake.
I made an orange flavoured sponge, and filled it with crushed pineapple. It was then covered with vanilla and almond buttercream before being brought to class on the Saturday afternoon.

To get the striped effect for the clown suits and the borders we painted the inside of the piping bag with colouring paste, and filled it with white buttercream.
The entire clown suit was piped using a medium size star tip (Wilton tip #16), and a bit of pressure. Then we piped some hands and feet, and a few buttons, before applying the heads .
The boarders were made using the left-over buttercream in the bag, to get the same striped effect. Add some balloons for the finishing touch, and the result is an awesome 3D clown cake perfect for any kids birthday.