a passion flower

A friend of the shop, Carly, brought a flower for me the other day. She told me it was a "Passion Flower."




It was so beautiful. I had never seen anything like it.




Carly said this passion flower was from the garden of one of her friends'. It was grown in Utah. Wow!




The passion flower closed itself up after a day, but it was still beautiful...



Thanks, Carly!

a small little fondant cake

For the last "Fondant and Gum Paste" class I made a small little cake for the class project.

This past week had been slightly hectic, so I wasn't able to dedicate some time to making flowers for my cake. I only had the flowers made during class time, which weren't many.

As I was about to bake a cake for the class, I thought, maybe I should just bake a small one, so I don't have to use too many flowers to decorate it.




The cake was just over 4 inches in diameter, and about 1.5 inches tall.

I covered it with green fondant, and cut out circles of brown fondant, along with rolled green, brown, and white fondant balls to decorate the side and bottom of the cake.

I tried to place ALL of my flowers on the cake, but it just didn't look right, so I only used a pink rose and a small leaf I made in class last week.




I really like how this cake turned out. Now that all three cake decorating courses are finished, I am ready to utilize what I've learned and hopefully make cute cakes all the time! :D

flower basket

For the last session of my Flowers and Cake Design class, I made a flower basket cake!

Each of us baked a cake at home, and brought it to class to decorate for the final project during class. I only baked half a batch of my cake batter because I didn't want to make a tall and layered cake. The thing was, as I was removing the cake from the pan, the bottom of the cake stuck on the pan and I lost a thin layer of cake, and that resulted in my cake being really short.

And because the cake was already short, I didn't even level the top of the cake before I iced it and brought it to class.

The main technique the instructor taught us to do was to make basket-weave patterns on the side of cakes. The idea was that we would make the side of our cakes look like a basket with buttercream icing, and then decorate the top of the "basket" with flowers we made with royal icing.

Since my cake was so short and round-topped, I couldn't make a more conventional flower basket cake. Instead, I made my version of flower basket cake...



My basket is on the bottom half of the top of the cake, and there's a handle on the top rim, and then flowers in between. A very rounded and puffy flower basket on the top of the cake if you may. I actually kinda like it!


The colored flowers were the ones I made in advance with royal icing.


And I added a few buttercream icing white roses when I was finishing up the cake.

Overall the cake turned out fine! Yay!

royal icing flowers

I almost forgot to blog about my "Flower and Cake Design" class! During this class, the instructor showed us how to make a few different flowers using royal icing. Royal icing is pretty much just powdered sugar, water, and meringue powder, and dries soon so users can make flowers or decorations in advance and use these hardened flowers whenever they need them.


My practice royal icing flowers.

I still can't make really pretty ones, but it surely is fun trying.

Plus these little royal icing flowers taste pretty decent, too! :D

flowers

I started the second cake decorating class course this past Tuesday, and this class is focused on flowers and cake design.

For the first class we learned about gum paste and fondant, and how to mix and utilize these two ingredients to make simple flowers.



Apparently this was the only class during this course that we were going to use gum paste and fondant to make stuff. For the most part we are going to learn to make different flowers and cake designs using royal icing.

Fun!