As some of you know, one of my big goals this year is to work on and improve my cake decorating skills. So far, I have none, but I’m working on it. This last weekend we celebrated a family birthday and I was once again, asked to make a second, or back up cake, to the main birthday cake. My immediate family continues to grow and this birthday cake was for my brother’s girlfriend. My mom made the main birthday cake, an earl grey tea cake with a honey buttercream frosting.

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Look how beautiful it is!!! She did a superb job decorating it, and the taste was incredible. I’ve never had tea infused cake before. This cake had the perfect balance of the earl grey flavoring without being overpowering. The buttercream frosting was also to die for. Mom said she put a whole pound of butter into the frosting!!! Genius. We were seriously eating the extra frosting out of a bowl with a spoon.

Now, without knowing what her cake would look like, I was hard at work trying to figure out what kind of cake I would be making. I already had a box of strawberry cake mix in the cabinet, so I figured I’d start there. (Typically I wouldn’t use a box cake mix, but for this cake I needed to focus on the decorating more than anything else.) But let me back up with my thought process. All of my cake decorating practice this year so far has been leading up to me making my niece’s birthday cake. She wants one of those fancy unicorn cakes that you see floating around on Pinterest. Currently, my biggest concerns are learning how to get sharp edges on the top of the cake, getting that perfect fondant texture, and learning how to pipe flowers and designs with homemade frosting on top of the cake.

Another technique that I wanted to learn was how to pipe two-tone frosting. So, as always, I started by checking out Sally’s website. She usually has tutorials and pictures of what she’s making and tips on how she got to the end goal. I was in luck! She has a recipe and tutorial showing how to make and pipe two-toned frosting. I probably watched this video three times and read through her notes at least 5 times to make sure I really understood how to do this. Also, her tutorial specifically made two-toned pink flowers. I figured with a strawberry cake, I would just try to replicate this design.

I know I probably sound like a big baby trying to figure all of this out, but seriously, I have no idea what I’m doing. Last year, I did myself a disservice when I bought my cake decorating kit. I bought this kit off of Amazon. It was cheap and had so many different options, I was sure I was going to be a cake decorating master in no time. Now while there is nothing wrong with the functionality of this kit, it is not a name brand. It also does not have any label or coding system for me to figure out which tip is which. All of the recipes and tutorials I’ve read and watched reference “Wilton Tip___”. Yeah, I have no idea which one that is. I’ve tried various ways to organize the set I have, and it’s been a chore. Nevertheless, I have separated out the tips I think I will need for the unicorn cake, and after much deliberation, I think I found the tips that resembled the flowers that I needed to use for this cake.

So after I had my cake baked, and cooled, I set about to get it frosted. For those of you who read my last cake post, I did try the cloth strips around the bottom of my cake pans again this time. But those results will be saved for another post this week. So I’ve got my cakes ready to frost. I decided that I was a lot easier to pipe the buttercream frosting in between the two cake layers rather than try to spread it with a knife. For those of you who have known about this hack for a while, kudos. I’m really late to to the game.

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Now again, I was recreating a cake I saw on Sally’s website. I had no idea what my mom’s cake was going to be decorated like. Here is what I was trying to mimic:

Ok, so I spread out the frosting to the side where the flowers would be, but purposefully did not make that side as thick as the side without flowers. For the sides of the cake, I wanted it to be “naked”, but not putting any frosting on the side would leave it looking pretty ugly. If you look closely at the two pictures above, you’ll see that I had to cut the cakes to level them and that some of the inside of the cake was starting to crumble at the edges. So frustrating. My goal was to spread enough frosting around the sides to even out the gaps in the two layers, and spread it really thin across the cake itself so that you could still see the color of the cake.

Now for the flowers themselves, here is where it gets really fun. Sally’s method was pretty simple for achieving two colors in the piping bag. I chose pink and white as my two colors, just like in her example. I divided the frosting into two batches and added the fuchsia gel coloring into one of the batches. Then take the colored frosting and line the piping bag as best as you can. Next, take the white frosting and put that in the middle of the piping bag. I piped a few small flowers on a paper towel first to make sure I was getting both colors as much as possible on the cake.

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I definitely need to work on my piping skills, but hey this was my first time. I’ll get more practice this week. This wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be though. Once I figured out which tips to make and got the frosting the consistency that I wanted, it was pretty smooth sailing after that!

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Here is what my cake came out looking like. I’m not a huge fan of sprinkles, but they help cover up any imperfections that you might have in your piping. And of course they add that flashy pop of color that everyone wants. The biggest stress I had with the cake was the sides. You can see that I left as much “naked” as I could. The parts that have a lot of frosting are the parts that kept falling apart and I needed to hide that. Stay tuned later this week for another post about all of that hoopla. I hope to have a few solutions by then. I’ll be watching a lot of YouTube tutorials this week to help me get ready for the upcoming unicorn cake!

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I hope you all have a wonderful Wednesday! -Jen