Rose Marry

When I first discovered this contest last year I wanted to do it soooo badly. However, I had never decorated a cake in my life and was a little intimidated by the whole process, so I held off. Since then, I have become pretty obsessed with cake decorating and am even lucky enough to do it as a part-time job, so I definitely wanted to give it a try this year.

I looked through tons and tons of t-shirt designs, but for some reason I kept coming back to Rose Marry. So that was that.

I made chocolate cake, and baked 3 square pans so that I would have extra to build the cake up with. First, I made a single layer rectangular base with the two larger squares. With the remaining cake, I built up on top of the base to create the figure. Once I was happy with how it looked, I covered the cake in raspberry buttercream (mmmmmmmmmmm!)I covered it in plastic wrap and set it in the fridge to firm up a bit.

Then I rolled out white fondant and covered the cake, taking this opportunity to create more detail in the face and finalize the shape of the figure. Now time for painting! Yay! With edible black colour I went about painting the image onto the raised caked, layer by layer, trying to keep the same fluent brushstrokes.

I wanted to incorporate 3-D flowers, since the rest of the cake is relatively 2-D. I had never made gum-paste roses before, but I just figured it out as I went. I built them up petal by petal, trying to mimic the flowers in the image as much as possible. To give them the same affect as in the design, I painted some black on them and added white and yellow highlights with fondant once they had dried.

All in all, this cake took me about 9 hours over the course of 3 days to complete. So worth it though, and super yummy too!! I let my boyfriend do the honours of cutting into it, which he did with great enthusiasm. It ended up being quite a lot of cake, so we actually still have some leftovers in the fridge :P