I made this rustic wedding cake for a customer who requested a simple wedding cake for her wedding reception party. And the reception package included a large decorated dummy cake (with a small portion of real cake solely for the purpose of cake cutting), but my customer wanted a real cake for her cake cutting ceremony. And so, she requested that I make a simple rustic and floral themed one for her.
2 tier rustic wedding cake in colorful roses
The request for this is rustic and chic cake was quite at the last minute, about one week before the function. Although I was reluctant to take up the order, she managed to persuade me into accepting it. She was not picky about the design. That was one of the reasons I accepted the order. That meant that I am free to design it for her. Her only wish was to have flowers on the cake.
Coincidently, I had some leftover gum paste roses and hydrangea which I made for another wedding cake. So I could use them to decorate the cake fairly quickly. I came up with a simple rustic design, agreed on the colors and she was all ok with it.
Rustic Wedding Cake
How to Make a Rustic Wedding Cake:
Main supplies for the cake:
- Cake – This was a two-tier cake with the top tier measuring 6 inches and the bottom tier measuring 9 inches. Each tier was 4 inches high. I used my butter pound cake recipe for both tiers.
- Buttercream – the entire cake was filled and coated with buttercream. I have 2 versions of the buttercream recipe that I use for my cakes. The first version is an all-butter buttercream while the second version is butter-shortening buttercream. Click here to go to my buttercream recipes page. Both are on the same page so do scroll down to find both recipes.
- Gum Paste – I used Satin Ice gum paste to make the roses and hydrangeas on the cake.
- Lollipop sticks
- Silver dragees – I bought these from a local cake decorating supplies shop.
- Butterflies – There were made of wire and soft cloth and not edible. I purchased them from a local craft shop.
- Petal dusts – I used a number of colors for the flowers on this cake, namely pink, violet, blue, orange and yellow.
- Flower drying stand
Assembling the rustic cake:
The gum paste roses and hydrangeas
- The first step in the process of making this rustic wedding cake, just like all other cakes, was getting all those steps and deco that can be prepared ahead of time ready in advance. For this cake, it was getting the gum paste flowers ready.
- I had some leftover roses and hydrangeas from another wedding cake order that I could use for this cake, but those were not enough to complete the design so I went ahead and made a couple more of these. All were made using white gum paste so it was pretty convenient to use them for this project.
- I have separate tutorials for the roses and the hydrangeas. Click here for the roses tutorial and here for the hydrangea tutorial. Or click on the images below.
Dusting the flowers
- There are no petal dusting steps in this rustic wedding cake tutorial. But you can see how I did it in the gum paste hydrangea flower tutorial. Follow the same steps to dust your white roses into any color you like.
- The roses were wired while the hydrangeas were not all wired. The tutorial I have above is for non-wired version. If you want to make wired ones, attached the centers onto a wire first, in a similar way to the rose bud. Use a smaller gauge wire. And the loop at the end of your wire should be as small as possible as the centers are very small.
- Leave the buds to dry completely before attaching the petals. To attach the petals, simply cut out one petal and insert the wire right through the center of the flower.
- Apply glue lightly on the base of the wired flower center to securely attach the petal to the center. To dry the flowers, hang them upside down on a drying stand. Once they are all set and dry, you can dust them.
Dusting the hydrangeas
- I dusted these in blue. Some were in light blue and some in darker blue. The roses, I dusted in violet, pink, yellow and orange. To match the rustic theme of the wedding cake, I dusted my flowers such that each had a deeper hue in the center and at the tip of its petals as compared to the rest of the other parts.
Rustic wedding cake with cascading floral deco
The wedding cake
- As for the cake, once both tiers were baked and cooled, I leveled and filled them with buttercream. And then I covered each tier with buttercream. I used my palette knife to create a rustic texture on each tier. And it’s the same rustic technique I used to decorate my buttercream flowers cake. Click here to see how I created this effect in step by step photos here.
Assembling the wedding cake
- Next in the process was stacking the cakes. I used bubble tea straws as the support structure for the bottom tier. And finally, I added the flowers. Since the roses were wired, I inserted the wires into lollipop sticks before poking them into the rustic wedding cake. The same with wired hydrangeas.
- The roses went on the cake first, starting right in the middle of the cake between the first tier and second tier. And then I worked my way down and after that, upwards is a swirling cascade. The roses were concentrated more on the bottom tier. The top tier and top of the cake had hydrangeas. Attaching the unwired hydrangeas to the wedding cake was very easy. The buttercream on the cake helped to hold them in place without the need for any fondant glue.
Top view of the rustic buttercream wedding cake with pretty gum paste flowers
The butterflies
- Once the floral arrangement was done, I attached the 2 butterflies. Since these were also wired, I used lollipop sticks for them too. And finally, to add the finishing touches to the cake, I attached silver dragees all along the floral arrangement at random intervals.
Rustic Buttercream Wedding Cake
And that was it, my 2 tier rustic wedding cake.
Happy decorating 🙂
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