This is a basic skill that everyone should know, because there will come a time when your buttercream needs to be rescued!

This style of cake looks best when the tiers are taller and closer in size to each other, rather than more of a pyramid shape. For example, a 5-7-9-11 will look better than a 5-8-11-14. The taller tiers make it easier to apply the flower petals in a flatter shape and make it look better.

One thing I didn’t mention in the video is that you can insert some of the petals backwards to fill in spaces at the edge of tiers. It isn’t noticeable when you look at the flower, but it helps the petals to fit around the edges of the tiers better.

(This is a tutorial that I did a few years ago for a chocolate pine cone method. The link will take you to the full tutorial with photos, but you can follow the steps here to do them without clicking through! http://acaketorememberva.blogspot.com/2009/12/chocolate-pinecone-cake-and-how-to.html )

This week I got to do a wedding cake that had sugared pine cones on it. It was based on a design from MS weddings, but the original cake had real pine cones and pine needles, which just made me think “eeeew” to myself.

I made the cones and needles out of chocolate, and I wanted to share the method that I used, since it gave a more realistic pine cone than the methods I’ve seen before.

When I see tutorials on how to make pine cones, they always start with making a cone shape out of fondant or marzipan, then sticking slivered almonds into the cone. If you look at a real pine cone, though, that isn’t how they’re shaped. The scales, which are the “leaves” so to speak, are attached to the center stem, and the size of the scales themselves is what gives the cone its shape. The center stem isn’t cone shaped, it’s fairly cylindrical.

So, I decided to try it a different way. I piped a bunch of chocolate scales and let them cool off. The trick to this, though, was that I heated the chocolate up way too much, in order to make it bloom when it cooled off. The bloom is the powdery look that chocolate gets when it hasn’t been tempered correctly. For pine cones, I wanted a rough, woody look, so the bloom was what I wanted in this case.

When they cooled off, I shaped some center stems from chocolate clay and started attaching the scales with melted chocolate. When they cooled off I turned them over and did the other side so that they were actually cone-shaped.

After the cones were completely cooled off, I used some meringue powder dissolved in water to attach sugar to the ends of the scales for the sugared look.

And this is the final product, with the chocolate pine needles also added. I like the way that these cones look, as opposed to the usual way that I see them done. Everyone at the reception site came over to look at them because they looked so realistic, and I was very happy with how the cake turned out.