And maybe a Rose on top .......

So my lovely friend Jane asked me to make a 30th Birthday cake for one of her lovely friends.

The brief for the cake was coffee and creamy.  I haven't made a coffee cake before but I did some experimentation and and found a cake recipe that I flavored with several shots of coffee, and it tasted great.  I decided for the creamy part I would put a layer of Bailey's mousse through the middle.  I have never added a mousse layer to a cake before but again, good old google came through with the goods, and it all seemed very easy.  So, I thought, no problem I am all sorted: bake Thursday night, ice Friday and decorate Saturday morning.

That was until, those fateful words .....".. and maybe a rose on top...." were spoken.

I was doing a final confirmation about the details of the cake on Tuesday afternoon with Jane, and I casually asked if there was anything in particular that she might want on the cake for decoration.  The first response I got was : "chocolate covered coffee beans" but then .. "and maybe a Rose on top.....they are her favorite flower".  And how could I not make Jane's lovely friend a Rose - it is her 30th birthday!!

Small issue through ... a rose is not created in a day! I am sure that most people don't know how long it takes to make a petal paste rose, and I wouldn't expect you to, but let me tell you with drying time it can easily take a week, and much longer if the weather is against you!

So pulling out all the tricks of the trade I pulled together one rose for the top of my Chocolate and Coffee Ganache Covered Bailey's Mousse Cake ... hope it tastes as good as it sounds!

Sugar Paste Orchid Wedding Cake

The wedding was beautiful, and the bride looked amazing!

The Sugar Paste Orchids looked great on the cake, and most importantly the bride was happy.

Now excuse me while I crawl back into bed to recover.......

Sugar Paste Orchids

We are going to wedding tomorrow.  It is our lovely friends Vicki and Dan who have been together forever and are finally taking the plunge.  It is going to be a beautiful wedding!

I thankfully had nothing to do with baking the cake! However the lovely Vicki asked if I could make her some flowers to go on top.

Frangipani Flowers

As I have been flat out since we got back doing a range of things (that I will post about in the near future!) we will be going back in time today......

Just before we went to New Zealand my lovely friend from work Kate, asked if I would make some flowers for her daughters birthday cake.

Her beautiful daughter loves all things yellow so she asked me to make some Frangipani Flowers for the top of her birthday cake.

Making flowers, at least for me, is really soothing, but like many things setting up is sometimes the hardest part of all.  So after a bit of procrastinating I set myself up in our living room one evening, and got started... this is my basic setup:

I thought about putting up a tutorial for making Frangipani Flowers but there are already so many on the Internet if you search.  Also everyone gets results in slightly different ways and sometimes you just have to make it up as you go along.   

Once the flowers have been made they have to dry for a while, and egg cartons are the best way to do this. 

They take about two to three days to dry and after that colour is applied.

After that it was just a matter of boxing the flowers up for delivery.

Kate just this week sent me though the promised photo of the much anticipated birthday cake:

I am so glad that Kate's daughter was so happy with her birthday cake!