It's A Piece of Cake!

I've been decorating cakes as a business for about 3 years.  Anytime I'm perusing the internet for ideas, I always enjoy the tutorials with step by step pictures showing how a cake goes from the batter to the finished product.  So I thought it would be fun to do my own version of that.  


My latest cake was for a wedding that had a very unique theme to it - peacocks!  I had a lot of fun planning and making this cake and the bride and groom provided me with some beautiful accessories to finish the cake off.  


The couple wanted a three tiered, fondant covered cake.  Each tier was vanilla cake with vanilla buttercream in between the layers.  So this is how it started out:

This is the bottom tier - 12" round and 4 layers high - I think it was probably at least 5" high.  Each layer is sandwiched together with buttercream.  I then put a crumbcoat of buttercream over the entire cake and cover it with fondant:

The holes are special hidden pillars that will help in supporting the other tiers.  I cut them to fit - just slightly higher than the top of the cake.  


On to the next tier!  The next level is a 9" round cake.  The middle and top tiers are placed on special separator plates that have little "feet" on the bottom that are designed to fit inside the hidden pillars.  The weight of the cakes are then supported by the pillars instead of the cake itself which eliminates any bulging and settling that could occur if you were to just place one cake on top of the other.  

The same crumbcoating and fondant covering process is repeated with the 9" and the 6" top tier.  Then they're all stacked together making sure the feet of the separator plates lines up with the holes of the pillars.  

Now comes my favorite part - accessorizing!  First I put the wide ribbon around the bottom of each tier:

Then I add the topper and the two peacocks - mostly so I can get an idea of how it's going to look.  I'm also going to be adding a paisley pattern with peacock colors and I need to know where the peacocks will be sitting so I can plan my paisley accordingly.  

Next, I begin cutting out the paisley patterns - I used a leaf cutter set which has 3 different sized cutters meant for leaves.  I just rounded the bottom instead of leaving it pointed which gave me the perfect paisley shape.  I used a combination of lime green, purple and teal:

Next step was to color some of my icing teal for the dots that were going to be around the paisley patterns.  I used the teal Wilton gel color:

So after "gluing" the paisleys on with icing, I added the finishing touches and hot-glued some thinner ribbon around the sides of the cake board.  And just like that, you have a finished, 3-tiered wedding cake all ready to go :)