This cake was made to celebrate a 40th wedding anniversary. The lucky couple had a party thrown for them by their children. Their oldest daughter was taking charge of the cake design. She had tons of great ideas and was really fun to work with. Often times customers will give me a general idea of the design they want, or they will send me inspiration pictures. For this cake, my customer knew what she wanted. She wanted an ombre rose cake. Easy enough, I’ve done those! She also wanted a silhouette of her parents and she wanted ruby red on the cake since the 40th anniversary is ruby. The most difficult request was that she wanted the roses to be fondant, not buttercream. Now is where I needed to get creative! I had some ideas, but had a tough time explaining them, so I sketched the design up on my Ipad and sent them over.
Here is the sketch of the design that she chose! You can see how it turned from a design into a cake! She wanted the bow to be fancier than the one I sketched which was not a problem.
I added tylose powder to red Satin Ice fondant and made all the parts of the bow. I let all the pieces dry for a few days to keep their shape, then arranged them on the cake. I added little red rosettes to the center of the bow to match the cake design.
Here is how I made the roses. I started with stiff royal icing and used a Wilton 1M tip to pipe some roses on parchement paper. I let those roses dry for a few days to get hard. Then I used food safe silicone plastique (a silicone mold kit) to cast the roses in the silicone. Once the silicone was cured, I had a rose mold! I actually made three different ones so I would have options and variations on the cake. Then I used the mold and gray fondant to make all the roses. It took a long time, which I didn’t mind. But it also took a whole lot more fondant than I realized! The cake ended up being so so so heavy and much wider than I expected. It still came out gorgeous, but a bit different than expected.
The heart cake topper had a silhouette of a man and woman and the number 40 to celebrate the cute couple. But the daughter wanted all their kids to be represented on the cake, so I added their 4 kids and their spouses and kiddies to the top of the cake. You can see this part unless you are looking straight down from a birds eye view. I like that this family tree is a bit hidden and a special surprise. Happy Anniversary! You can find all these silhouette cutters in my shop!