Preheat oven to 170 °Celsius.

Beat butter and sugar till soft and creamy for about 2 minutes. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition.

In a separate bowl, sift flour, baking powder, and salt. Fold in the sifted ingredients into the creamed mixture alternately with milk, starting and ending with flour.

Apply a coat of shortening on the edges of the cake top and place the twisted strips on top. Repeat the process until you achieve a complete wreath that is about the same size as the cake diameter.

In joining the Christmas wreath pieces together, adjust the ends so that they look as natural as possible.

Where it is too thin, roll out additional chocolate strips and attach them to the wreath especially at the joints.

Use the extruder tool and pipe out white strips of fondant. Make 2 different shapes, one a flat wide strip and the other, small plain thin round strip.

Next, straighten all the strips properly before leaving them aside to set. Once set, paint them gold. To make the gold paint, mix a few drops of lemon extract into some edible gold dust. The consistency should be like a paste and not to liquid.

Measure and mark your cake at regular intervals to position the strings. Firstly, measure the circumference of the cake. And then divide and mark it into equal intervals, making sure the intervals were neither too narrow nor too wide, just nice to evenly space the baubles on the cake.

As for the length, since some are short and some were long, mark these on the cake as well.

And then apply a thin coat of glue at the back of the thin fondant strips and carefully attach them to the cake.

Cut off any excess using the sugar craft knife.

Dust each of the round maroon cutouts with pearl luster dust. This will give them a pretty luster shine.

Attach the gold snowflakes to half of the baubles. Use shortening to hold the flakes in place. And then, using the opposite end of one of a thin cake decorating brush or a skewer, mark tiny little dents around the edges.

Fill the dents with gold dragees, one dragee into each hole. To hold the beads securely in place, apply a light coat of fondant glue into each dent before placing a gold dragee into each of them.

Leave these aside and decorate the remaining maroon circles with the second design, i.e., the gold geometrical lines. Start with the wider strips, followed by 2 thin strips on either side. After that, attach these to the circles with glue. Use the sugar craft knife to cut the excess strips off them.

Once the baubles are done, cut out small pieces of square maroon cutouts, and using the same round cutter used to cut the baubles, cut off a portion of the squares. These are to become the tiny top portion of each of the maroon circles. Dust these with pearl luster dust.

Once done, attach these small pieces to the cake, one piece at the end of each fondant strip, followed by the snowflakes baubles at the end of each long strip and the geometrical lined ones at the end of the short strips.

Once the leaves are all cut, arrange them onto the cake. Start with the leaves on the outer edge of the wreath. And apply a layer of shortening to the back of each leaf before putting them on the cake.

Once the outer layer of leaves is done, do the inner layer. Apply a thin coat of shortening at the back of each leaf to hold them in place.

To complete the wreath, add tiny holly berries made out of red fondant to it. To make sure the berries don’t go rolling all over the cake top, apply glue to each of them so that they are held in place securely.