A few weeks ago, Ellen came to me to make sure I was onboard to make her birthday cake (I was.) Then, she asked if we could make it flapper inspired, and pointed me in the direction of a little inspiration. If you remember from Ellen’s birthday last year, I’m not an artist, I’m a baker. So of course, I enlisted the help of Becca, and Ellen pitched in her talents (with words of encouragement and knowing where to be at the right time from Christie, too!)
Here’s what we came up with…
Everything on the cake was edible, save the feathers (we weren’t quite up to that challenge.)
We started with a three layer vanilla cake (with a little strawberry in the batter!) Here’s the recipe I used for the cake (it might be my new cake recipe for good!)
Layer it with frosting…as you’ll see in the example, they covered the whole cake in fondant, but since I’m not a big fan, I stuck to frosting.
We stuck in in the fridge for a few minutes to let the frosting solidify, then we rolled the fondant band out.
Attached it here…then put it back in the fridge for a few minutes. Now it was time for the chocolate leaves.
The night before, we had made chocolate leaves. This consisted of taking leaves from outside, washing them, then painting them with melted dark chocolate.
Here are the painted leaves….
We used silicone brushes, and Trader Joe’s semi-sweet pound chocolate bar.
After you freeze the leaves, you peel them off the actual leaves and stick them to the cake! At this point, it was all hands on deck — we had to use ice packs to keep our hands cold (thus the leaves from not melting) and got them in a layer around the bottom (go team!)
The night before we also made pearls out of fondant.
Becca strung them (with real thread, so the whole thing wasn’t edible, but you COULD have eaten the pearls off the string!)
Then we spray painted it with gold (edible) spray paint, leftover from Jen’s birthday, to make them shine.
Ellen also made this flower from fondant to add to the top, which we did after we had added the fondant band and leaves.
Ellen put the pearls on.
And there you have a flapper inspired cake! Was it as pretty as the one we found online? No. But was it delicious? Absolutely.
Happy Birthday to my lovely, wonderful, crafty friend Ellen! May your actual birthday be as fun as your party!
This is us at Ellen’s birthday party — she even matched the cake!!
(Thanks to Becca + Christie for making the cake for me pitching in!)
[addtoany] Yum