buttercream flower cakes are the rage these days. apparently its very popular with the koreans and they seemed to have "revived" this trend of making old school buttercream cakes into something more modern and beautiful. i decided to jump on the bandwagon and hereby present to you my first ever buttercream flower cake made for my 15th wedding anniversary! prior to this, i have no experience piping flowers, as in, petal by petal. my piping tip repertoire is pathetic and i probably own like what, 5 piping tips at most. i have a couple of plain tips which i use for macarons and eclairs, 1 saint honore tip and a 2D flower tip for rose swirls in cupcakes. oh right, and a bismarck tip! so this time, i made a trip to the baking supplies shop and bought 10 tips for making various flowers and leaves, plus a flower nail and lifter.


i started making the roses a week ago and froze them. if i have to rank this in terms of difficulty, i would give it 10,000/10. i spend my days on youtube watching different people make them and i still couldn't really get it right. it looks simple but there are so many factors that contribute to making a good looking rose. how firm your buttercream is, the way you hold the tip, how much you turn the nail etc etc. the base also needs to be firm and tall enough so you'll get a rose that isn't too flat. all in all, not easy and the easiest part is probably piping the leaves lol.


for the cake i used a genoise soaked with vanilla rum syrup and for the frosting + roses i used italian meringue buttercream. normally i shy away from frosting whole cakes because when i do, they're usually fit for a mention on cake wrecks. but this time, on youtube, i learned this technique about frosting the sides of a cake by piping using a very large tip (ateco/wilton #789 icer tip) instead of doing it with a spatula. and to smooth it, use a dough/bench scraper instead. wow, it really worked! no more having to crumb coat and frosting the whole cake was done in double quick time. credit goes to chef alan tetreault of global sugar art. wished i chanced upon his channel sooner. i love learning new techniques on baking and decorating.

overall, making this cake is fun though this is not really i wanted. i really wanted to make a bouquet kind of cake with different flowers like pansies, chrysanthemums, carnations, ranunculus etc but i guess as a first attempt i shan't be too ambitious. and to be honest, i wonder how people can stomach the whole thing because there's sooo much cream. for the experience, its great but for eating, i don't think so and we scraped it all off., luckily, the sponge itself was nice.