70th Birthday Cake with Flowers

This 70th birthday cake design makes an elegant cake design for a woman. With flowers as the main theme, this single tier fondant birthday cake with handmade gum paste roses and simple fondant flowers makes a truly pretty 70th birthday cake.

The overall color theme of this 70th birthday cake design is ivory and maroon.

The cake itself is a vanilla chocolate marble pound cake, filled with buttercream. It is covered in ivory colored fondant and decorated with handmade sugar flowers. The lettering on the cake are cut out with block letter cutters in maroon gum paste.

The flowers on the cake, especially the gum paste roses were made 2 days in advance. That will allow them sufficient time to set. The other sugar flowers on the cake were made with fondant, and these can be made in advance too if you wish, but making them on the day the cake is being decorated would work too.

For a matching theme color, you can cover the cake board in maroon fondant and the cake border can be further decorated with gold ribbon (not edible) and fondant rope border.

All in all, this 70th birthday cake design is fairly easy to put together. Get the full list of supplies, ingredients and decorating tutorial below.

If you like floral themed cakes, you should also check out this flower pot cake, flower bouquet cake, flower cake with edible royal icing butterflies, simple buttercream flowers cake and this buttercream rosette cake.

🧾Supplies Required

• Cake – this was a 7 inches round cake and measured 4 inches high. I baked the cake using my marble cake recipe.
• Buttercream – I used buttercream to fill the cake as well as to crumb coat it.
• Fondant – The entire cake was covered in Satin Ice Ivory. The cake board was covered in maroon (a mix of red and black fondant). I used the same color for the small blossoms on the cake as well as the cake border.
• Gum Paste– I used gum paste to make the roses on the cake as well as for the lettering on the cake. To achieve the deep shade of maroon, I tinted my white gum paste with a combination of Americolor Maroon and Americolor Electric Purple .
• Floral wire – I used 18 gauge wire for the roses.
• Lollipop sticks – these were used to insert the wire on the gum paste roses before putting the roses on the cake.
• Gold dragees – these were purchased from a local cake decorating supplies shop.
• Fondant extruder – I used this tool to pipe out the rope border for the cake.
• 5 petal flower plunger cutter
• Simple blossom cutter with veiner
• Hydrangeas petal cutter and veining mold
• FMM Sugarcraft Tappit Block Letters and Numbers cutter
• Gold ribbon
• Fondant glue and shortening

👩‍🍳How to Make

Step 1: Make the Gum Paste Roses

I used white gum paste and tinted it with a combination of maroon and electric purple food colors. I wanted the rose petals darker on the inside towards the center and slighter lighter on the outer petals.

And I used a Styrofoam ball as the core in making these roses. Click here for my full tutorial on how to make gum paste roses. The tutorial does not use Styrofoam balls, so if you plan on using them for your roses, you would need to attach them to your floral wire as shown. I prefer to apply hot glue to my wire before inserting it into the Styrofoam balls. This way, the foam balls remain totally secured to the wire.

Step 2: Bake the Cake and Cover with Fondant

Next was the cake itself. I baked the cake in 2 separate tins, and once baked and completely cooled down, I levelled and sandwiched them with buttercream. And then I gave the cake a crumb coat before covering it with fondant.

After that, I covered the cake board. For the cake board, I used Satin Ice Red and added a little black to it. I started with very little black and kept adding it little by little until I got the right maroon hue.

Step 3: Attach the Lettering on the 70th Birthday Cake

The next step was getting the lettering done for the cake. I used FMM Tappit letter and number cutters to cut out the birthday message in gum paste. I used the same color as roses.

After the lettering, I prepared the rest of the flowers for the cake. I made them with fondant and used a combination of Ivory and 2 shades of Maroon for these.  I had a total of 4 different types on the cake.

The first two largest ones were the hydrangeas and simple blossom. Click here to see how to make the hydrangeas and here for the simple blossom flowers. The other 2 types of flowers on the cake were slightly smaller ones. Both of these were cut using my 5 petal plunger cutters. Of these two, I veined the larger ones using the same veining mold as my simple blossoms. And left the smaller ones plain.

Step 4: Assemble the Cake

Once I had all the decoration pieces ready, I assembled the 70th birthday cake. I started with the roses, followed by the lettering on the cake and then the swirls. 

I rolled and shaped the swirls by hand and attached them to the cake with shortening. 

Once all the swirls were done, I put on the flowers. I used glue for the flowers to make sure they are totally secured to the cake. This was because some of them were placed on the cake edges and had I used shortening, there is no guarantee that the flowers will stay in place where transporting the cake.

After the flowers, I attached the gold ribbon and added the red rope border around it. I attached these with glue.

And finally, I added the gold dragees randomly on the cake edges. I did not use any glue to put these on the cake, I merely pressed them into the fondant to hold them in place.

And that’s it. An elegant 70^th birthday cake idea for a charming lady.