I drew inspiration for this floral bouquet cake from real flower bouquets. Flower bouquets make excellent birthday gifts (at least for me!) and I thought it would be quite cool to use the idea to decorate a cake.
This floral bouquet cake was designed for a birthday. It was one of those last-minute requests I received for a birthday cake. The cake was decorated with a bouquet of wired gum paste flowers. Although gum paste flowers would normally take a bit of time to make, I was able to assemble the cake fairly quickly as I had some extra flowers on hand. So, despite the design requiring gum paste flowers and the fact that the order was a last-minute one did not really matter. I could complete the cake within a reasonable time.
How to Make a Floral Bouquet Cake:
Here is what I used to make this cake:
- One 6 inches by 10 inches rectangle cake. The cake itself was a single layer cake and I used my chocolate cake recipe to bake the cake.
- Gumpaste flowers – the flowers were all handmade. Like I mentioned earlier, I made use of whatever flowers I had in stock to come up with the bouquet. So I had calla lilies, petunias, and carnations as the main flowers and some tiny filler flowers. I made sure the flowers were matching with the cake though. I also had some green gum paste leaves in the bouquet. All the flowers and leaves were wired, which made it easier to group and tie them together into a bouquet. I have also used net and ribbons to fill up spaces in the bouquet and to make it look full. I arranged the flowers such that the larger ones are mainly at the bottom of the bouquet. Towards the top, I used smaller flowers. Overall, the bouquet was made to be in a triangle like shape.
- Royal icing – I used royal icing to pipe the border for the message plaque. I also used it to pipe the wordings on it.
- Fondant in white and pink– I used white fondant to make the message plaque. I cut it out freehand into a scalloped oval shape. In doing this, I made sure the size was just nice for the message and was in proportion to the flower bouquet. The pink fondant, on the other hand, was for the small flowers that were scattered on the cake.
And here is how I assembled the floral bouquet cake:
- I had the gum paste flowers and leaves on hand, so all I had to do was make some ribbon loops and net clusters and tie all these together neatly with floral tape.
- As for the cake itself, once it was baked and cooled, I covered it with a thin layer of buttercream and then covered with fondant.
- Next was the birthday message plaque. I cut it out from rolled out fondant and piped the birthday message on it using pink royal icing and Wilton piping tip #3. Using the same colored royal icing and icing tip, I also piped a border for the fondant plaque.
- I also used some pink fondant to cut out tiny flowers to be placed randomly on the cake. I then left them aside to set.
- Finally, I placed the gumpaste floral bouquet on the cake and laid the message plaque at the bottom end of the bouquet. I also attached the tiny pink flowers randomly on the cake, making sure they are well spaced out. These were attached to the cake using royal icing (since I had royal icing, I used it to attach the flowers onto the fondant covered cake. You can also use water or shortening to stick the flowers).
And that was it. The cake was ready.
Hope you enjoyed this sharing.
Happy decorating 🙂
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