I was doing so well at blogging every week… then July happened sorry! It has been a little crazy, I promise I will try and get back on track.

Just before we went to England last month, I was asked to make a wedding cake for a friend. I was excited and nervous in equal measures as I have never attempted anything on this scale before.

I was sent an email with pictures of the sort of thing they wanted. Luckily they were fairly flexible and had no set colours or flavours, both were left up to me. The two main criteria I had to meet were; individual cakes with a larger cake on top and not too much buttercream, that was my idea of 30 cupcakes out of the window!

A lot of the pictures sent over had some kind of floral element to them. I don’t work with sugar paste very often so the thought of making multiple mini roses per tiny cake did not fill me with joy! I quite quickly came up with the idea of having a peony on the top and petals falling down.

Then followed quite a while scouring the internet and Pinterest for ideas, however, nothing really came up. So I took to my sketch pad and came up with something I thought would work.

We then headed back to England for 10 days and while in Waterstones in Norwich I came across this amazing book called Cakes in Bloom by Peggy Porschen. If you want to have a go at making sugar paste flowers I would highly recommend this book. The photographs are absolutely beautiful too! When I flicked through in the shop there were a few designs fairly similar to what I had come up with, so I purchased it straight away!

This book actually came into most use when baking the cakes. There is a really handy guide on how to prepare cakes in advance and a good time scale to use. I also used the cake recipes in the book.

I was fairly pleased with the end result. It wasn’t perfect but I am happy for my first attempt. I also enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would!

The top tier was a moist chocolate sponge cake filled with chocolate ganache. The little cakes underneath were a mixture of vanilla sponge filled with vanilla buttercream and orange sponge cakes filled with orange buttercream.