Ombre Petal Buttercream Cake

Each year for my sister and my birthday's when we were growing up, our mom would take us to the local bulk food store and let us pick out a cake pan, which she would then make our birthday cake with.  We had all kinds of characters, Ariel, Barney, Blue's Clues etc.  This year, my parents and sister came up on my mom's birthday, so I thought it was a great opportunity to make HER a birthday cake after the many, many years of her making cakes for us.  After looking around at some of the cake ideas I had pinned on Pinterest, I decided to make an Ombre Petal Buttercream Cake (here is the original link).

Mmm, good enough to eat!

 Since they were coming up on Thursday and I am out Thursday evenings, I had to make the cake in stages.  Tuesday evening I made the cake and Wednesday I decorated.  I made a regular chocolate cake, since chocolate is her favourite.

As soon as I got home from work on the Wednesday, I got does to work.  First I made the icing and then leveled the cake while it was mixing, so that it would rest more evenly.  I haven't used my leveler that much, as I hate to waste cake, but it works really well (and the cake taken off was not all wasted....I quickly started to feel sick from the amount of sugar I was consuming hehe).

Bottom layer leveled. 

I decided that since my mom's birthday is on Valentine's day, I would make the icing pink, plus it is more girly :).  I made a double batch of Wilton's buttercream icing in the thin consistency (however, I found that I had a quarter of it left, or half of a normal batch left, so I would only make a batch and a half in the future).  I used Wilton's pink icing dye, with the first colour of pink having only one dab of colour in it to make it the lightest for the cake.

I used the lightest colour of pink to ice the whole cake.  Since I was going to be covering the cake with more icing, I only covered it with a light layer and I didn't bother with how good it looked.

Once the cake was iced, it needed to sit before I could get started, which was perfect since I needed to make the colours and fill my bags.  I thought that I would need to make the icing consistency more stiff, so I added around 4tsp of icing sugar to stiffen it up.  However, as I worked with the icing, I think that I should have just left it at the thin consistency, as I could that the petals were cracking sometimes when the icing came out of the bags. 

 After I mixed in the extra icing sugar, I filled a bag completely full with the lightest colour of icing, I was a bit worried that I wouldn't have enough, however, I had more than enough icing.  Next, I added to more dabs of pink dye to make the medium, filled a bag and then made the darkest using 4 more dabs of dye.  I sort of just eye balled the colours until I was happy with the colour change.

For the "tips" to make the petals, I just used the couplers, as the blog I read said to use tip 1A, which I thought I had, but do not. I found that these worked fine, however because the couples are note perfectly round, but have a slit in it, the icing would not come out in a perfect circle.  I think that having the tip 1A would probably be a bit better.

Along with the icing, I also had a clean cloth, spatula, glass of warm water and a container to be able to clean my spatula off as I went.  The blog I read did not really explain the use of the water fully and it was not until I was almost finished, that I realized that you need to be dipping the spatula into the water and then pressing down on the dot to make the petal, as it gives it a more smooth look.

This came in really handy, as I was taking a fair amount of
icing off as I made the petals.

Making the petals was quite simple, just time consuming.  I started with making two rows of the dark pink on the bottom.  I put two dots on the cake and then used the spatula to spread the icing down until it was thinned out and then would place two dots over top of the thin part and continued the process around the cake and repeating with the other colours.

The top layer on the side only has one row of the lightest pink, that pink was continued around to the top with two rows, then two rows of the medium pink, one row of the darkest pink.  For the very centre, I placed a large dot of the darkest pink and just smoothed it out until it looked nice (ends up looking like a flower right in the centre).

 

I think she likes it!

And that's it!  In all, it look around 2 hours to make and ice the cake, which I do not think is too bad.  The blog I read suggested that you could do this cake in different ways such as making the petals go up the cake or using a square spatula, I think some of those ideas sound really good, although for now, I would like to prefect this way!