Billa Cakes: Portfolio: Flower Cake

What a weekend! I had two cakes this weekend, both for little girls named Madel(e)ine! (Their names are spelled slightly different, hence the 'e' in parentheses within the name, FYI) My best friend's daughter Madeleine had wanted a Tinkerbell cake for her birthday last year, but then she decided that it wouldn't match with her bowling party, so instead we did a pink bowling cake. (Yeah, I know, I never expected that from a four year old, but considering that my daughter is just as precocious as Madeleine, I better get prepared!) Needless to say, I wasn't surprised to hear Madeleine ask for another Tinkerbell cake this year. I had to take into consideration that this party is for about 8-10 little girls, so I settled on a 9" two layer round cake, single tier. Madeleine's family doesn't mind fondant, but they aren't the biggest fans, so I tried to keep it to a minimum on the design.

To accomplish this, I iced the entire cake in pink buttercream icing. I then rolled out green tinted fondant and cut strips of grass which I pushed into the sides of the cake. I saw these gorgeous flowers on one of my favorite blog's the other day (scroll down that post to see them in closer detail...aren't they amazing!?) and just had to try and recreate them. I don't have the same flower cutters that Marian does, so I used a star shaped cutter to cut the flowers out from fondant and then draped them over a slightly domed surface to let them dry. My domed surface of choice? Plastic Easter eggs! Because they were so small, I couldn't use a bowl and I didn't have the time (or the cash) to run out and buy flower forming molds. (On a side note, it's totally possible to compete with the best; you just need a little creativity, some ingenuity, and a ready supply of kid's toys to choose from!) For the large flower in the surface, I used a leaf cutter to cut the individual petals and then laid them inside a soup bowl to get the gentle curve. Then I cut out tiny stars from white MMF for the flower centers and once everything was dried enough, I just pushed them into the buttercream. Once everything was in place, I finished it all off with a purple ribbon of fondant along the bottom, which tied everything together, but also hid the the bottoms of the grass quite nicely.

The cake flavor was vanilla and chocolate marble, but I colored the vanilla pink, since I know it's Madeleine's favorite color. I wish I had a picture of what her face looked like when I told her that, she was WAAAAY excited, lol!

Now you're probably wondering where Tink comes into all of this. She doesn't, actually. My brother Philip came over with a video game and I got a little...um, distracted. So I didn't have time to go out and get a Tink candle much less make one from fondant (which to be honest, I wasn't planning on since I knew I didn't have time for that originally). But it didn't matter, because Madeleine, her family, her friends, and her friends' families all thought it was an amazing cake and all of the party decor was pink or princess themed anyway.