Happy Birthday Mommy!

Mum asked me to bake a cake. Honestly! I might have not too subtly suggested that I want to bake one for her… but she asked me anyway. And I was super happy to try! I had so many ideas running through my mind and I showed my husband a few million sketches of the cake and I’m sure he had his doubts about having married me. Anyways, in the end I shot down all my far-fetched ‘Ultimate Cake Off’ ideas and settled for a super simple cake that looked more wedding-y than I liked. But it tasted awesome and was all gone in 2 days!

This is the cake in action…

And here’s a section of the cake…

And here’s why I think its super wedding-y…. white with red roses and silver dragees? Really?

The cake is the Best Chocolate Cake Ever from I am Baker. (Just realized that it's just the 'Best Chocolate Cake' and 'Ever' has been my own subconscious appendage.) The frosting is butter cream and the stripe technique I’ve used is also from I am Baker, though hers is SO much better.

The red ribbon and red roses are made from Marshmallow Fondant and taste yuck! I used way too much powder food colouring. My sister says it’s actually not colour but weird powder flavouring that I’ve used. We threw out all the roses but a bit of the ribbon did get eaten. It had a sort of sourness that did taste strangely nice against the sweetness of the frosting. But only strangely so!

To make the roses I followed a fondant ribbon rose tutorial on Youtube. There are so many of them and they're all pretty much the same. 

A huge blunder I made was that I decided to grind my own granulated sugar and make it icing sugar. It didn’t have the smoothness that comes with store bought icing sugar and so the roses began to crack and I had to quickly refrigerate them to get them firm. Can you see them breaking away in the picture below? Well… live and learn!

And finally that gratifying picture of the cake safely tucked away in the refrigerator after hours of slaving over it.