Clematis Cake

My good friend and colleague is retiring tomorrow so I've tasked myself with making her a retirement cake. She is a keen gardener and her computer wallpaper is this beautiful clematis she grew in her garden (I sneakily took a photo of her computer screen when she wasn't looking - ha). Soooo, that's the theme of the cake...

 

I'll admit here to being well out of my sugarpaste comfort zone with this project, I usually only do very simple cake designs. Luckily, I found this great sugarpaste clematis tutorial online and bought all my supplies from Imaginative Icing in York.

 

In the end I made five flowers consisting of seven petals each and wired the individual petals together with florists tape. I also made some loose petals - they were handy for filling in any gaps and also for hiding some of the bodges in the icing on the sides of the cake.

 

 

To get the right colours I used a combo of three craft dusting powders - Foliage Green, Pink and Dusky Pink. I used a paint brush to dab on the colours - Green for the centres, Dusky Pink for the tips and Pink for the petal centres and edges. You can be quite rough at this stage as the next step is to brush on pearl lustre powder and that really seems to blend the colours and make the petals look more natural. The stamens were bought. -  I wired a few together to create the flower centres and coloured them green with the dusting powder.

 

 

Happy Retirement Yvonne, I hope you like the cake!



Sally

xxx