I know the flowers on the cake are an odd assortment of shapes and colors, but that's because most of them are the left over from other cakes I've made. It is strange, but once I put a gumpaste flower on a cake I have no qualms about throwing the flower away after the cake is cut and served, but for some reason I can't make myself throw away gumpaste flowers that I made but didn't use on the intended cake.
My strange quirk came in handy when I needed to make a last minute cake for a friend's 50th birthday party.
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There are lots of different flowers on this cake, but the peonies are my favorite. With just the peony petal cutter and a styrofoam ball, you get a beautiful flower with very little effort. Just cut out a bunch of petals in various sizes, and give them a little texture with a veiner wand. The veiner wand is this great all purpose tool that you can use to add a little texture to any flower or leaf. With this baby you don't need a different silicon veiner for each flower type. Saves on storage space and money. Win-win.
After the petals are made and textured, just glue them to the styrofoam ball. I use both the 1" and 1-1/2" balls for my peonies. To see this process in action just look up gumpaste peonies on YouTube. Here is a link to the Global Sugar Art video on peonies.
I allowing each layer of petals to dry a bit before putting on the next layer.
For the bark of the "stump" I used a Tree Bark Texture Mold. I melted chocolate chips and poured the chocolate into the mold. I spread the chocolate into all the crevices, and then put the mold into the freezer to speed up the hardening of the chocolate.
Then I unmolded the solid chocolate plank...
And then broke the large block into smaller pieces that roughly fit the height of the cake. You don't need to be precise or exact, the bark looks better if it is a little messy and oddly shaped. Stick the pieces of chocolate to the cake using chocolate frosting. Any gaps between the pieces of chocolate can be filled with chocolate icing. And don't worry if the frosting is a different color than the chocolate. The bark looks much better if it has different tones and colors. You can also dust the chocolate with edible food color powders (brown, green, white) to make it look even better. (I forgot to do that on this cake so the bark looked a little monotoned.)
The mold for making bark worked pretty well, but you need to be careful not to make the chocolate too thick. If it is too thick it is hard to break the plank into appropriately sized pieces, and frankly it waste a lot of chocolate. And let the party goers know that the bark is chunks of Ghiradelli chocolate and not fondant. I couldn't believe that people were throwing away all that luscious chocolate thinking it was nasty fondant!
The topper on the cake was a last minute addition. I have this Cricut Explorer that I don't use nearly enough. I bought it thinking I could use it to cut out fondant and gumpaste, but I never got it to work correctly. So now I just use the Cricut to cut out random things - like this cake topper personalized with the birthday girl's name and age. Kind of cool, huh?? And all it cost was $1 for the sheet of red glitter paper, well that and the $200 for the Cricut.
So I think the birthday girl was pleased with her cake. Happy Birthday, Gwen. Hope we are both around for you 100th birthday. I wonder what the cakes will look like in the year 2068???
Happy Decorating,
Carol
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