Plumeria Wedding Cake - A Decorating Tutorial

Here is a plumeria wedding cake I designed recently. The theme flowers were plumeria. Plumeria flowers are also known as frangipani. And the overall intention was to create a wedding cake with minimal decoration, keeping it simple yet elegant.

A 2 tier white cake with plumeria flowers and a Mr and Mrs gold topper

A simple white wedding cake with elegant plumeria flowers

The wedding cake itself was easy to assemble. Having made the flowers in advance, it was quite a breeze to set the wedding cake up!

How to Make Plumeria Wedding Cake

Supplies needed:

Cake – This was a 2 tier cake. The bottom tier measured 9 inches round while the top was 6 inches round. The height of each tier was 6 inches, hence the total height of the cake without any decoration on the top was 12 inches. I used my butter pound cake recipe for the cake. If you intend to use the same recipe, please do note that since this cake tiers are 6 inches high, you would need to increase the calculated recipes for 6 inches and 9 inches round cakes by 1.5 times as my recipes were calculated to produce cakes that are 4 inches tall.
Buttercream – Each tier had 3 layers of cake and each layer was sandwiched with vanilla buttercream. I also used buttercream to crumb coat the cakes before covering them with fondant.
Fondant – I used Satin Ice white fondant to cover both cakes. Satin Ice works best for me and I use it for all my fondant cakes.
Gold ribbon – I used this ribbon for the cake borders. This was purchased from a local craft shop and is not edible.
Gum paste plumeria flowers – I made these flowers in advance using Satin Ice white gum paste and then dusted the centers with yellow food color.
Mr and Mrs wedding cake topper – this was a ready-made wedding topper I purchased from a local cake decorating supply shop. It was made of glitter paper and attached to a white lollipop pick.
Fondant glue – I made this glue using CMC powder and used it to stick the plumeria flowers onto the wedding cake as well as to attach the gold ribbon to the cake.

And this is how I assembled the plumeria wedding cake:

I started with the gum paste plumerias a few days in advance. Click here for a detailed tutorial on how to make gum paste plumeria.

I started with the basics – leveled the cakes, sandwiched them with buttercream and then stacked and crumb coated with buttercream. Each tier was separately covered in fondant and stacked on top of one another.

The cake board I used for this cake was 9 inches round, and was the same width as the bottom tier of the cake.

I then wrapped the gold ribbon on the borders of each tier and secure the ends with some fondant glue (if fondant glue does not work well, I sometimes use hot glue to secure the ends of the ribbon and in doing this, I take extra care to make sure the glue does not touch the cake).

Next, I poked the glitter “Mr & Mrs” topper in the center of the top tier. And placed two gum paste plumerias on the front of the topper. These were secured in place with some fondant glue.