Ruffled buttercream cake with gumpaste roses

I haven't really had the opportunity to practice making gumpaste flowers since those classes I took last year at the Vancouver Pastry Training Institute. But finally, for a lady celebrating her aunt's 61st birthday, I got the chance to make a few roses and carnations on a vertical ruffled cake. 

vertical ruffled buttercream cake

The cake is a coffee butter cake, which is just the usual vanilla butter cake recipe that I make, with 1 tablespoon of instant coffee dissolved in a little bit of water added in. The cake filling is coffee Swiss meringue buttercream. The birthday lady really loves coffee you see. 

lotsa of buttercream needed to make all these ruffles!

The buttercream ruffles are made from vanilla Swiss meringue buttercream, dyed a shade of blush pink. In hindsight, I really should have made the pink darker, to match the colour of the flowers! For some reason though, it is very difficult to get pastel colours (ie. baby pink, baby blue) on Swiss meringue buttercream. For pink, if I add a little colour, it turns peach. If I continue to add more, it turns a darker peach. And when I add more colour...boom! It turns a regular pink. Not baby pink or light pink. I really don't know why. Same with blue. When I add a smidget of sky blue food colouring, the buttercream turns light green. Yes, green! And only when I've added a substantial amount of colouring does the buttercream turn blue. And even then it's a sky blue, instead of light baby blue. 

In any case, let's just say that the flowers stood out on top of the cake. The ruffles were piped using tip no. 104. It is very important to crumb coat the cake first before adding the ruffles so the the ruffles have somewhere to stick to, otherwise, the whole thing will just collapse sideways (Yes, it happened to me). This was actually the first time I was piping vertical ruffles and I had to scrape all the cream off the cake and try again 3 frustrating times before I was satisfied with the uniformity of the ruffles. 

gumpaste flower bunch

Keep the fat end of the piping tip against the cake, while steadily applying pressure to the piping bag, move your arm back in forth squeezing ruffles of about one inch wide and slowly make your way up to the top of the cake. Do not release the pressure on the bag until you get to the top so that you have one continuous ruffle. If you move upwards too fast, your ruffles will have too big a spacing in between and won't look too pretty. For the ruffled top border, using the same tip with the thicker end facing your body, move your arm in a motion like you are writing a little upside down "U".

For the gumpaste flowers, I dyed the gumpaste 3 shades of pink. The roses are made with two sizes of rose cutters. I wish I had bigger cutters, because the roses weren't very big at all. I softened the edges using a ball tool before shaping the petals, wrapping them one at a time around the flower centers. 

pink pink pink flowers

The carnations are even easier to make. Just cut several of them out using a carnation cutter, then soften the edges by rubbing a wooden skewer back and forth. fold each carnation petal in quarters and then stick 4-5 of them together with a little bit of water. Sorry for the crappy pics, but here are some visuals of the step-by-step.

soften the edges using a wooden skewer

fold each petal in half, twice

stick petals together with some water to form carnation

I placed a bunch of flowers on the top of the cake and a bunch on the side on the cake board. The cake was finished off with the birthday lady's name standing on top of the cake. Happy 61st Birthday, Doris.

Happy 61st Birthday, Doris!