Mother's Day Cake - An Easy Decorating Idea

I made this Mother's Day cake for my mom many years back. It was a simple cake with a topiary design on it and a basket weave pattern on the sides of the cake.

Poster for a rectangle cake decorated with buttercream topiary in pink

A pretty pink topiary Mother's Day Cake

The cake was pretty easy to decorate. I used buttercream and butter icing for the entire cake. The cake itself was a single tier cake and I did not layer or fill it with any icing.

I was generally pleased with my Mother's Day cake, though I wish I had made the pot look a little better. I particularly like the topiary plant itself with all the tiny pink flowers in it.

Let me explain how I made this cake.

How to Make a Topiary Mother's Day Cake

Main supplies for the cake:

Cake - the cake measured 6 inches by 10 inches rectangle which I baked using my butter pound cake recipe.
Buttercream - I used buttercream for all my piping work which includes the cake borders and the topiary plant.
Buttericing - Butter icing is just a stiffer version of my buttercream. I used this to cover my cake.
Piping tips - I used a total of 4 different piping tips for this project. One is a round number 3 (for the wordings), star number 18 (for the rope borders), serrated basket weave number 48 for the basketweave pattern, leaf number 67 for the leaves and a drop flower tip. All these are from Wilton except for the drop flower tip. I purchased this from a local cake decorating shop. I tried to find a similar one with Wilton but could not find one that is an exact match. However, Wilton has a couple of other drop flower decorating tips that can be used in place on mine. Here is how mine looks like:

Disposable piping bags - I always use disposable piping bags when working with buttercream. They are the easiest as no washing is required after use!
Wilton Alphabet press - I used this to imprint the word 'Mummy' on the cake. I bought this press quite a number of years ago and cannot seem to find it online anymore, so I am unable to provide the link here).
Silver dragees - I used this as the centers for all the 5-petal pink flowers I piped on the sides of the cake.
Sugarcraft knife

Assembling the cake:

Once the cake was baked, I leveled it and covered the top with butter icing. As I have mentioned earlier, I did not fill the cake with any icing, so this was just a single layer cake covered in butter icing.
The buttericing I used was not tinted with any color hence the light yellow color of the icing is the natural color of butter.
After that, I covered the sides with basket weave designs.

Buttercream basket weave piping on the side of a cake

The buttercream topiary

Next was the topiary plant and the pot on my Mother's Day cake. These were made by mixing my earlier cake crumbs (after I leveled the cake) with butter icing. The consistency should be similar to making cake pops.
For the pot, I added cocoa powder and formed the pot by hand. As for the plant, I used the same cake and icing dough. I formed a half sphere with the guide of a small bowl I had. And then I added the stem with brown icing which I piped using my star tip.

The top view of my Mother's Day cake

And then I covered the topiary plant with green leaves (using my leaf tip). After that, I added the tiny pink flowers in random order and finished off the topiary on my Mother's Day cake with more leaves around them.

Buttercream topiary with pink flowers and green leaves.

Top close up view of the buttercream topiary on the Mother's Day cake

Side close up view of the buttercream topiary on the Mother's Day cake

The Mother's Day cake border

Next was the cake border. These were rope borders piped using my star tip.

Buttercream basket weave piping on the side of a cake, with pink piped flowers

Wordings on the cake

Once the border was done, I did the wordings. To do this, I used Wilton letter press, and imprinted the word 'MUMMY' on the cake. The plan was to leave just the imprinted letters on the cake. However, after doing that I felt that the cake would look better with some color on the wordings. So I used my round piping tip and pink icing to pipe over the imprinted word.

And for the final touches on the Mother's Day cake, I piped tiny pink flowers all around the sides of the cake. There is also one on the pot and I added silver sugar dragees as the centers.

And that was it. My topiary Mother's Day cake was ready.

Hope you enjoyed this.

Happy Decorating 🙂

Easy Mother's Day Cake - A Decorating Tutorial