I pretty much had free reign on the cake, so I thought I should try something new. I had bought the Wilton's gum paste flower cutter set, so this was a perfect excuse to use it. Since I like purple and ombre always looks pretty, the colour scheme was chosen!
My cousin said that Red Velvet with Cream Cheese was his mom's flavour of choice, so that was chosen too!
This was a 2 layer cake, covered and filled with cream cheese icing and then topped with fondant. This was a big mistake! Cream cheese icing does not work well under fondant at all, hence the dome like shape! It doesn't hold it's shape and just slides around creating large bumps. When I needed to use cream cheese icing under fondant again, I created a buttercream dam around the cream cheese filling and then covered the cake in more buttercream before covering in fondant, which worked much better. Buttercream stays fairly firm at room temperature which allows the cake corners to be sharper after it's covered in fondant.
I spent hours creating these little flowers, and then went to work adding them from the bottom up. I think the effect was pretty :)
From this view you can see how the cream cheese icing made the cake so lob sided :(
The '50' was made a few days in advance, so the gum paste had time to dry.
In the end, my aunt and family enjoyed cake, so I was happy with the overall result :)
