Gray Chevron Cake + Big Pink Flower = Love

This has become one of my new favorite cakes!!

I made this cake for a sweet sweet friend of mine who is having her third baby girl…a very very big surprise!!  We celebrated Dana this past weekend and ate some incredible food sitting out looking over the river with some beautiful women inside and out!!  It was such a lovely night!

Dana, God has something AMAZING planned for you and that sweet baby growing inside you!  She is an absolute miracle and is destined to change the world in more than one way! :)  She will change your life forever, but she has been molded and planned for a very special purpose and I can’t wait to see what is in store for her!!  God is good!!

On to the cake!  So, this is my “signature” cake now…I guess! :)  I love this design and when I first did it last year, Dana told me, “If you ever make me a cake, I want that one! – with coconut inside!”

So, that’s what I did!  It’s a 6″ round cake with 6 thin layers of coconut cake with white chocolate coconut SMBC filling and white chocolate ganache for the crumb coat.  It stood just over 6″ tall.

 

If you want to know how to create this design, I share it with you all (as well as a WHOLE bunch of other stuff) in my Craftsy Class, “Clean and Simple Cake Design”.

The colors were gray and pink…which I love!  So, I knew the chevron graphic would be gray and I’d need to do a big ol’ flower on top in pink!!  – but I wanted to try out a new flower.

Every baby girl needs some pink!

I really haven’t made many “actual” sugar flowers that look like the actual flower! :)  I love fantasy type flowers that are graphic in nature and are on the more bold side of things.  I knew I wanted a large flower with lots of petals on it so I looked up a few rananculus and camellia flower tutorials and found THIS great post.

Sarah gives you the step by step instructions to create a paper rananculus.  I loved this post because she gives you the templates for free so that you can cut out your own paper flower.  I don’t have many cutters because I usually create my own templates and hardly do the same design twice.  So, I used her pdf and cut out 7 sizes of 5-petal flowers (using her free pdf).  I did that while watching a movie but you can use a Silhouette machine if you have it.  For this flower I actually used Fondarific gumpaste (I’ve been trying out some different brands of commercial fondants/gumpastes) I added a little red modeling chocolate to it to make it pink and rolled it out real thin.  I cut out two 5-petal templates for each size giving me 14 flowers.  I used my new favorite tool to cut all those petals out…a scalpel!!  There’s a few different sizes/types, so make sure to get the #11 blade because it’s awesome! :)  I didn’t add ridges to the petals like a real rananculus because I was just playing and wanted something not exactly like one.  I wanted it a graphic impression of one.

 I started with a popsicle stick and stuck on the top a ball of green starburst I had melted a bit and rolled into a ball.  I then took a small round icing tip and poked a hole in the center of each petal so I could slide it up the popsicle stick.  I then started adding the smallest petal flower all the way to the largest while wrapping each petal on top of the next petal over.  Oh, going back for a second…I had colored the smallest  6 flower petals a light pink, the next 4 petals a medium pink and the last 4 (the biggest ones) a darker pink.  Then I stuffed little tissues between some of the petals to keep them raised from each other while it dried for 4 days.

I then realized I didn’t like how I did the center…it was inside the flower too much.  So, I added a tiny ball of green melon flavored Fondarific fondant on top of the green starburst and added the rings and texture with some icing tips and veining tools.  The melon flavored fondant was amazing…it tasted and smelled like melons!!!!  – crazy yummy!

  And I ended up with a fun, feminine, graphic interpretation of a ranunculus.  I know it’s not a realistic version…more of a stylized one…but I liked it!! – and thought it looked fantastic with the cake!

Thanks for looking!