Peony Cake at Miss Biscuit Beginner's Cake Decorating Class

Happy Mother's Day to all the lovely mums out there!! 

I thought it would be appropriate for today to show off a cake that I decorated at a Miss Biscuit Beginner's Cake Decorating Class last weekend, which could have been given to mums today to celebrate.  (My mum is too far away and doesn't like cake that much, so my cake went to work.) 

This beginner's cake decorating course involved learning how to level and tort a three layer cake, stack and assemble the layers and fill and cover with buttercream, work with gold leaf and gold paint, and how to create a beautiful gum paste peony to crown the top of the decorated cake.

We were taught by the lovely Miss Lisa, who runs a wedding cake decorating business but who has chosen to also pass on some of her skills to us:

 
Lisa was very patient, helpful and kind throughout the class, happy to answer countless questions, and to assist the "all thumbs" people like me without judging.  (For the record, the balling tool and I were not friends, nor were I and the cake scraper used to level out the buttercream.)

Here is Lisa demonstrating how to roll out the gum paste and cut it into petal shapes:

 
We made three stamens, 4 x small petals, 5 x medium petals and 7 x large petals.

After veining and wiring the petals (wiring is not for the faint hearted!), you curl the edges using a balling tool - not my friend:

 
After the petals have been dried (we cheated and used a dehydrator for time reasons), you dust the petals and stamens with petal dust for colour and movement:

Then you bind the stamens and petals together using florists' tape: 

 
Et voila - your very own gorgeous peony:

 
While the petals were doing their drying thing in the dehydrator, we cut our commercially made mud cakes into three layers using both a knife and a wire cutter (to see which one suited us best), filled the layers with Over the Top brand buttercream, did a crumb coat, and finally covered the outside of the stacked cake with more buttercream and levelled it out with a scraper (yikes!).

Then we got to be arty again, and painted the deliberate rough rim on our cakes with gold paint (made from gold lustre dust + rose spirit), and carefully brushed some gold leaf onto the sides of our cakes (great for hiding the imperfections): 

Finally, we bent a hook at the end of the wire stem of our peonies and stabbed them into the top of our cakes, like a fairy queen atop a float: 

At the start of the class, I had a few moments where I wondered at the wisdom of putting myself through it all, but at the end, I was very proud of my cake.  It's far from perfect, but it looks very pretty, and I did it myself - under the patient guidance of Lisa.  My colleagues who knew the story behind the cake were very impressed with the end result - and so was I.

Miss Biscuit

65a Charles Street

Seddon VIC

Ph: 9687 2916 

 

(Note that there is also a store in East Balmain in Sydney)