Bridal Shower Cake

Well, this week, I had orders for four cakes, the pinnacle of which was for a full sheet cake for a bridal shower. I found a picture online of a tiered wedding cake I would love to replicate into a sheetcake. It was adorned with calla lillies, roses and daisies and something that appeared to look like lily of the valley or baby's breath. I wasn't very thrilled with the results of the method I was taught in my fondant and gumpaste class for making calla lillies, so I found another way to do them at Wilton's website. I'd like to share the process involved with these beautiful flowers and hope you'll find them as much fun and easy to make as I did.

A few tools you may be surprised to need include paper cones, like for sno-cones, a thin piece of foam (used for shaping fondant) and a large heart shape cookie cutter (or smaller depending on how big you want the flowers). I called my local party stores looking for the cones, with no luck, and finally found them at KMart. They had a full line of sno-cone products, syrups, holders, ice crushers, etc on display on an endcap. I'm sure these are a seasonal item, so when you find them, you may want to stock up for what you'll need over the next year.

To begin, I mixed equal parts of a smooth, high quality fondant with a batch I had fixed myself. Buying fondant can be very pricey, and I found that I got the same elasticity and ease of use by "watering it down" with my homemade fondant...improved the taste of my own batch too! lol

Roll out the fondant quite thin, about 1/16 of an inch, and cut into heart shapes using the cookie cutter. Use a straight-edge ruler and cut off just the top bumps of the heart, cutting straight across the heart's width.

Place the large piece onto your foam and with a ball fondant tool, press out the edges of the petal, all the way around. Then using the straight edge of the petal as the base, curl it into a cone shape, overlapping the ruffled edges, to form the flower.

As I'm writing this, I realize you can probably even press out the heart bumps with the ball tool as well, and use them as ruffled leaves.

Set it over the top of one of the inverted cones, which has been dusted with cornstarch to prevent sticking. I made up a bunch of them and set the cones on a large cookie sheet so I could move them around easier.

Take the scraps leftover from between the heart cutouts and add a tinge of yellow food color paste, working the color in until it's uniform. Then roll the yellow fondant into a long and skinny log about 1/8 inch thick. Cut the log every 2 inches or so to make stamens for your flowers. I left one end squished and sharp to set it into the flower with stiff buttercream (or royal icing would work too) and rounded the other end to be the tip. I also laid them out slightly curved to appear more natural and not so stiff-looking.

Let the stamens and flower cones dry for about 4 days on the cookie sheet. Remove the flowers from the paper cones. I used a shishkabob skewer to put a small dollop (about the size of your thumb nail) of yellow buttercream into the bottom of the flower and then smoothed it in a circular motion with a small paint brush, brushing some of the yellow color up slightly onto the sides. Insert the stamen into the fresh buttercream and let sit to dry again until the icing is set, maybe a half hour to an hour, depending on how much buttercream you used.

The cake I was making was to have a peach color theme, so I added some peach highlights to the inside as well, using the paintbrush and some peach colored buttercream, thinned down with vanilla extract. I painted the area around the stamen, where the yellow buttercream ended, blending it smooth to transition the color to peach. I didn't come up out of the flower too far, so the color had a more natural and highlighting effect, rather than overpowering.