Cake Catch Up

It was my fiftieth birthday last year and Jen helped me celebrate in style with, what I think, is her best cake to date. I requested red roses, which are my favourite flower and that's exactly what I got. Jen has spent a lot of time practising get clean sharp edges with her icing and this cake really showed it off.

We treated ourselves to a Kitchenaid cake mixer at the start of last year and it came with a free pasta attachment, which is a great help to achieving a consistent fine thickness with sugarpaste petals and leaves. I was keen to have a go with the pasta attachment myself, so when Jen's birthday came round later in the year, I decided to try the  striped tier from "Wedding Day Dots and Stripes" by Trudy Mitchell in the October/November 2017 issue of  Cakes and Sugarcraft.

I picked a couple of different flowers and made them over a couple of weekends. I was busy at work during this time and although I managed to bake the cake, I wasn't able to finish it before Jen arrived on her weekend visit home from university. From this point it became a family effort. Graeme helped get things moving by "plastering" the buttercream and I managed to get the base layer of sugarpaste on the cake. Jen applied the stripes herself. Then together with Christina, she made the leaves and small blossoms. 

The flowers were arranged on the cake using posy pickers. It was the first time we had tried them and they worked really well. I like the way every angle looked different on this cake. 

Finally there is the Christmas cake. Jen was busy with project work at Christmas so she chose a simpler cake design this year. She found this super cute  Snow Foxes design on Pinterest. The snowball idea  was from the Red Nosed Reindeer cake she made a couple of years ago. The end result was an elegant ands understated cake.