Thursday, May 18, 2023

Confetti Cake with Flowers and Candy

Nothing says Happy Retirement/Birthday/Graduation like confetti!! I just love confetti sprinkles. They make everything just a little bit brighter and happier.

This is a 9" cake frosted in American Buttercream with confetti sprinkles scattered around the base and top along with flowers and lots of chocolate candy.

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This was an easy cake that I threw together at the last minute. The flowers were left over from previous cakes, and the candy was all store bought. The smaller pink daisies were made using a silicone mold, and I made the larger yellow daisies using a daisy plunger cutter.

I made the topper using my Cricut Explorer. I just use the Cricut to make simple things, but it is still a handy piece of equipment for a cake decorator. I've also used it to make stencils for cake and cookie decorating.

And those Confetti Sprinkles, I use them by the handfuls.

Happy Decorating,

Carol

Berry 1st Birthday

Here are some simple to make Berry 1st Birthday themed cakes.

The tier cake is an 8" bottom tier and a 6" top tier. They are frosted in a pale pink American Buttercream and decorated with fondant strawberries. I used this line drawing to create fondant cutters with my 3D printer. I made two sizes: 1-3/4" and 1-1/2". If you would like to read more about making your own 3D printed cutters, click HERE.

The strawberry is a cutter and embosser combined so I cut out the strawberry shape from red fondant and then embossed the little divots for the seeds. I tried painting the divots with white and yellow food gel, but that didn't look very good, so I just cut out tiny yellow circles and used those for the seeds. It was very time consuming because I had 25 strawberries to decorate.

I used a rose calyx shaped cutter to make the green calyx part of the strawberry, and added a little texture to the sepals using a veiner tool. For the lettering I used FMM's Funky Tappits 3cm upper and lower case.

For the smash cake I baked two 8" round cakes, and carved them into the shape of a strawberry. I frosted with a thick coating of white buttercream, and then added a thin coating of red buttercream on top of that. I wanted to limit the amount of red buttercream because I didn't want the poor baby's face and hands to get too stained up with red food dye.

Normally I would have made the strawberry seeds out of fondant, but I was afraid the tiny fondant pieces would be a choking hazard so I made them out of buttercream. I smeared a thin coat of buttercream on some parchment paper and froze the buttercream for 10 minutes. Then I used a tiny heart shaped plunger cutter to cut out little seeds and placed them on the cake. I should have used an oval cutter instead, but I couldn't find them in my bins of supplies. Guess I need to buy more.

The buttercream defrosted and softened very quickly so I had to keep popping the buttercream strip in the freezer so it could harden up again.

For the greenery on the strawberry I went ahead and used fondant. The pieces were large enough that the baby could pick them up and gnaw on them if she wanted. I just cut the pieces by hand and then used a random silicone veiner to give it some texture.

So in the end this was a pretty easy cake to put together. The hardest part was placing all the seeds/pits on the strawberries. Next time I will just leave the little holes unfilled.