Vanilla Buttercream Cake with Buttercream Flowers

An awesome buttercream cake tutorial. Learn how to make easy buttercream flowers to create stunning results for your cakes.

The flowers are all piped in random order, but I focused them on the upper half of the cake. 

In piping the flowers, I alternated the colors. This is so that there is a balanced spread of them on the cake. 

And to not move the focus away from the floral decor on the sides of the cake, I made a simple border in matching white stars that I used to accent the rosettes. I left the top of the cake blank with just a smooth coat of buttercream.

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How to Decorate a Buttercream Cake with Simple Buttercream Flowers – Video

Check out my video on how I decorated this buttercream cake:

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Below is the step by step tutorial on how to decorate this buttercream cake:

How to Make Simple Buttercream Flowers Design for Buttercream Cakes

Main supplies for the cake:

• Cake – this was a 5 inches round cake consisting of 4 layers of cakes. I baked the cake using my vanilla cake recipe using the measurement for 2 eggs.
• Buttercream – I used my buttercream recipe for this icing and made using 600g of icing sugar and 300g of butter. This amount was just nice for a cake of this size, but do note that I used very little buttercream in between the cake layers as that is how I prefer my cake to be. If you wish to add more, the amount of icing would need to be increased slightly. It is impossible to make the exact amount of icing so I did have some leftovers of the tinted icing upon completing the cake.
• Piping tips number 1M , 352 , 18 and 21. These are all-star tips except for tip number 352 which is a leaf tip.
• Disposable piping bags
• Buttercream scraper
• Wilton food colors in Burgundy , Rose Petal and Juniper Green
• Palette knife

Decorating the cake:

Baking the cakes

• I started by baking my cakes. This was a 5 inches round cake consisting of 4 layers of cakes. I baked the cakes one day in advance and kept them in the refrigerator, wrapped in cling wrap until they were ready to be assembled.

• The next day, I leveled the cakes and stacked them with vanilla buttercream between each layer.

Crumb coat

• To lock the cake crumbs, I applied a thin coat of buttercream to the cake, smoothed the top and sides and placed the cake in the refrigerator for about 15 minutes to allow the buttercream to set.

Covering the cake with buttercream

• And then I took it out and applied the next layer of buttercream which is also the final layer. In covering the cake with buttercream, I made sure the top and sides were smooth and level.

The buttercream flowers

• Next was the buttercream flowers. For this design, I piped simple rosettes in 2 sizes and 2 different colors. To accent them, I piped small star flowers in random intervals and completed the buttercream flowers on the cake with tiny buttercream leaves.

Mixing the colors

• I started by mixing my icing colors. I used only three colors, i.e. burgundy, rose petal pink and juniper green. And then I fitted the all the 3 star piping tips and one leaf tip into 4 separate piping bags. And then I filled my burgundy buttercream and the rose petal buttercream into 2 separate piping bags. Here’s the full picture:

• If you notice, only the green icings is filled up in a piping bag fitted with piping tips. The burgundy, white and pink do not have any piping tips fitted to their piping bags. This is because I had only one each of the 1M, 18 & 21 star tips and had to use the tips 1M & 21 for both the burgundy and rose petal pink buttercream. The best way to manage this situation is to use the double piping bag method. You can read all about it in my other post here, but in a nutshell, I will be inserting the rose petal pink icing filled piping bag into an empty piping bag fitted with tip 1M  and pipe the light pink flowers.

• Once the light pink flowers are done, I remove the icing bag from the 1M fitted piping bag and replace it with the piping bag containing the burgundy icing. 

• And I did the same thing for my tip number 21 which I had to use for both the burgundy and the pink icing. 

The large rosettes

• To begin with, I inserted my pink icing filled piping bag into the piping bag fitted with tip 1M and piped large rosettes all around the top half of the cake in random order. 

• And then I removed the pink icing piping bag and replaced it with the burgundy icing bag. With the same random intervals, I piped large burgundy rosettes all around the top half of the cake as shown below.

The small rosettes

• Once the large rosettes were done, I went on to add smaller buttercream rosettes on the sides of the cake. Similar to the large rosettes, I started with the rose petal pink icing. I inserted the pink icing filled bag into the one fitted with tip number 21 and piped small rosettes in random order, close to the larger buttercream rosettes piped earlier. 

• And I repeated the same with the burgundy icing.

The white flowers

Next were the white star flowers. I piped them with star tip number 18, also in random order such they they filled up the gaps between the large and small rosettes. 

The buttercream leaves

• After that, using leaf tip number 352 and buttercream tinted in Wilton Juniper Green color, I piped tiny green leaves randomly near and in between the flowers. In piping the leaves, I made sure they were not overly concentrated in any one spot. Rather, they were well distributed all around the cake.

• Once the leaves were done, I felt that more buttercream flowers were needed to complete the design, hence added more white flowers and rosettes to the sides of the cake.

• Finally, to complete the cake, I used the same icing and piping tip I used to pipe the white star flowers to pipe the border for the cake. And the border too was a row of buttercream star flowers. 

With that, my vanilla buttercream cake with buttercream flowers was complete. 

What do you think? 

Happy Decorating 🙂