Sunflowers Cake - Behind the Scenes

This isn’t a tutorial, but more of an explanation. I discovered that many people thought this cake was a painted sheet cake. Actually, it is a three dimentional cake with fondant and wafer paper flowers that I painted with ACP (Amber Adamson’s recipe of powdered food color mixed with shortening) and cocoa butter paint. This little collage shows some of the behind the scenes work on this cake.

The vase is a vanilla sponge cake with white chocolate ganache and covered in fondant. I made the flowers by inserting a wire into one half of a syrofoam ball. I used styrofoam to make the flowers lighter. I then covered them in fondant and made wafer paper petals. I airbrushed the wafer paper.

Most of the flowers are inserted into the PVC pipe in the middle of the cake. I also used some straws into the cake for others flowers.

I then dusted and painted the cake and flowers with brush strokes to make it look more like a flat painting. I also painted the sides of the vase brown so that straight on it looked like the vase was outlined like the original oil painting. I painted two pieces of foam core board with acrylic paint as my background to look like the painting. Painting the horizon line helped make the picture of this cake look flat.

You may notice (if you saw the original post of this cake) that it looks slightly different in this behind the scenes look. Truth is, I made the original cake as a display cake so it was a cake dummy. But then the cake met with an early demise by falling over. Many of the petals on the cake broke. :( At the same time, I had a couple people suggest I show a picture of the cut cake. Because it was a dummy cake, obviously I couldn’t. But when it fell, I got to thinking, as long as I need to fix it anyway, why not make a real cake? So I redid the “vase” as cake, and then transferred the sugar flowers to the new vase. Then I fixed the flowers as best I could and photographed the cake with a slice missing. I am so glad I did! Even if I cannot keep it as a display, I always have the photos!

I hope some of you find this a little bit helpful.

Happy Caking!
Jenny

Jenny’s Haute Cakes
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