Flower Birthday Cake - Circle of Daisies

I made this flower birthday cake for a girl friend's birthday. To be frank, this was another of those last minute cake requests I often get from family and friends.

There was no specific theme for the cake, not that I would have been able to cater for it anyway ( I would have loved to, but time was a big constraint!). So I had to come up with a design that I could complete given the very short time I had (overnight to be exact).

A round white cake decorated with fondant daisies

Somehow, designing cakes for women is easier than it is for men. At least for me it is.

I quite like working with floral designs and have a tendency to incorporate floral designs into my cakes. So when there was no theme given and the cake was for a woman, I, off course went the floral route.

I had a container of fondant daisies which I made for another cake project. Had lots of daisies leftovers. And so this design was born:

Here is how I made this daisies flower birthday cake:

This is fairly easy and fast cake to decorate. All you need are:

A round, fondant covered cake ( I baked an 8 inch round butter pound cake. It's a 2 layer cake, sandwiched with buttercream and covered in white fondant)
Fondant daisies (you can also use gum paste daisies. I just happened to have daisies made with fondant, so I used them for this cake.
Royal icing (for the piped borders)

And here is how I assembled and completed the cake decoration:

As I said, since this was a last-minute order and I had the fondant daisies on hand, I started with baking the cake and covering it with fondant.
But if you are planning to make something like this, I would think making the flowers first would be a good idea as you need the flowers to dry and set in shape before you can use them on the cake. Overnight is ideal (for me) but it would really depend on the humidity in your place.
The flowers themselves are pretty easy to make. All you need is a daisy flower petal cutter and fondant/gum paste and you are all set to make the flowers. Simply roll the fondant or gum paste into a thin sheet, cut the flowers out using the daisy cutter, add the centers (made using yellow fondant/gum paste), and dry them in a curved flower forming cup. Once the flowers are dry, they are ready to be used. I have a whole tutorial page on how to make gum paste daisies. Click here to go to the tutorial page).
Now on to assembling the cake - Once the cake is cooled, layered, crumb coated and covered in fondant, use royal icing and pipe the borders. I piped reverse shells for the top and plain shells for the bottom. I used royal icing as butter icing does not work well on fondant.
Finally, I attached the daisies onto the cake with royal icing (since I had extra royal icing on hand, I used it as a medium to stick the flowers onto the cake. Otherwise, I would have used water or shortening).