April is turning out to be a busy month of cakes! There's an Easter cake for Easter Sunday, cupcakes for my colleagues, a Diamond Wedding Anniversary Cake, more cake for colleagues, my fiancees birthday cake and then the finale of a wedding cake on the first weekend of May, phew! After that I get a bit of a break until my birthday, for which I am currently dreaming up a design to practice new skills and techniques.
So I made a start on the first cake a couple of weekends ago and made all of the sugar roses for my grandparent's Diamond Wedding Anniversary cake. I looked for inspiration for traditional cakes, but they were all very dull, so I decided to go for something a little more like a wedding cake to make more of the occasion. My Nan had long stemmed red roses and ferns in her bouquet and lace on her ballerina length wedding dress, so I decided to combine all of these elements together on the cake.
I used my trusty Peggy Porschen sugar flowers cake book to help me make the roses, and I started with Poppy Red Renshaw sugar paste mixed with Tylose powder to ensure they set. I made a range of different sizes to make 12 roses in total.
3 rose buds, 3 small roses, 3 medium roses, 2 large roses and one full rose in progress. This is the drying stage before the scary bit of the next layer of petals when you have to turn them upside down to dry!
However unfortunately as the roses dried they lost their lovely deep rose colour and became light and powdery-looking. It wasn't the colour I was looking for at all, so I got out my paintbrush and colours and painted all of the roses until they were the correct shade, all the time singing "Painting the roses red" from Alice in Wonderland! Whatever gets you through the day...!
I used a mixture of three colours to achieve the right shade for the roses.
When wet the roses looked almost like they were made from porcelain! Luckily they are still edible!
You can see the difference in colour between the ones at the front and at the back and I was much happier with the colour as they dried.
Luckily the roses have kept their deeper hue as they have dried which is brilliant. I think next to the dark green of the ferns, the snowy white of the cake and the pearl sheen of the cake lace they will look very impressive and hopefully be a fitting centrepiece to a brilliant day.
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