This cake was done for a sweet friend of mine, Julie, who surprised her mother last week for her mother's birthday. How fun is that? Her mother was truly surprised, too! I love it!
Well, Julie's mother likes to cross-stitch and her favorite color is purple, so I ran with those two things in my design. Julie helped me think of ways to incorporate the cross-stitch.
What do you think??
I admit I was a little nervous over this one! I didn't have a lot of time to practice the cross-stitch piping before doing the actual cake and I wasn't sure my piping skills were up to the task. But, I must say, I'm pretty proud of the result. That was a lot of little X's to pipe! And, yes, I did each little X one by one to make it look as much like actual cross-stitch as possible.
Here's a close-up of the flowers.
Do you think it looks like cross-stitch?
After the flowers were done, I thought the design needed a little something, so I added the little swirls and sugar pearls off to the sides.
For those of you who want to imagine you are eating this lovely thing, here are the details! :)
The bottom tier is an 8-inch dark chocolate cake with strawberry swiss meringue buttercream filling. The top tier is a 6-inch vanilla-chocolate marble cake with oreo filling. The entire cake is covered with vanilla bean swiss meringue buttercream and iced smooth. The flowers, stems, and scrolls are all piped with colored vanilla bean swiss meringue buttercream. I used a Wilton #1 tip to do all of the piping so that the lines would be as small and fine as possible.
I did learn one thing: when using a #1 tip, which has a very small opening, it's best to NOT include the vanilla bean seeds in the icing. I never would have thought a vanilla bean seed would ever plug anything up, but I had to keep unclogging my tip while piping those X's! Lesson learned. :)
I hope you enjoyed my latest creation! It was so much fun to make!
Looks good to me! Looks yummy, too!
ReplyDeleteokay so I found u on cakecentral! I love love love your cakes! they are stunning....i have searched your blog but do not see any recipes for the cakes you use?
ReplyDeleteDo you have some favorites you are willing to share?
Thank you both! Shari, thanks for finding me! I have shared one cake recipe so far, I think. I'm getting ready to share some more, but am tweaking them a bit to make sure they are perfect. I probably need to make my blog a little more search-friendly! Let me go grab the links and I will post them in another comment here.
ReplyDeleteHere are some links to cake recipes I've put here on the blog: cinnamon cake (http://sweetkms.blogspot.com/2011/07/cinnamon-cake-recipe.html); chocolate cake (http://sweetkms.blogspot.com/2011/08/midnight-dark-chocolate-cake.html) (I've revised this recipe and will post a better version soon); almond-ginger spice cake (http://sweetkms.blogspot.com/2011/11/almond-ginger-spice-cake.html). I also have some cookie, pie, bread and brownie recipes in some posts. I realized finding these that I've been forgetting to put the tags on my posts. I'll try to be better at that from now on! Enjoy!
ReplyDeletePretty and creative! It sounds so yummy! pssst, you can edit your old posts to add the tags, in your spare time of course. : )
ReplyDeleteSuch a pretty and unique looking cake. I love the way you carried the design across the two tiers.
ReplyDeleteThanks Kate! And thanks for reading my blog!
ReplyDelete