How to make Buttercream Roses and Mini-Cake
So what do you do….when you really want to make a cake for someone….but you just can’t justify the cost of making a whopper. Or perhaps you want to make a few presentation cakes at the same time but cupcakes just don’t seem enough of a statement?
I LOVE making mini cakes. I think they can be pretty and heartfelt and they are so much more special and personal than a bunch of flowers.
For this little poppet….I just made a simple chocolate orange cake and cut discs using a 3 inch circle cutter. Of course the size is up to you but this is as small as I want to get without making it too fiddly. I froze the cake before I cut it so that as it was defrosting it was easy to make clean cuts without any crumbs and misshaping.
I actually made 4 mini cakes out of one baked cake and used the off-cuts for cake pops….so you can see how efficient this can be for making little gift cakes!
My top tip for making it easy is keeping the cake stable as you layer and buttercream it. I tend to fix the cake board to my turntable with tape….so it doesn’t slip around. And I work with the cake while it’s either chilled or defrosting because you can handle it SO much easier. And if it starts to get slippy…I just quickly pop it in the fridge or freezer until it’s manageable again. With 4 little cakes on the go…. I just kept swapping them in and it was all done in no time.
I layered this one with chocolate orange ganache….but the process is exactly the same if you just want to layer with buttercream.
My TOP TOP tip is orange sugar syrup. Oh my word….it makes chocolate orange cake to die for. Just boil up the juice of one orange with 2 tbsp sugar to form a light syrup that you brush on your cake layers. Not only does it keep the cake moist but it gives it that orange ZING! 😉
So what about the other tips?
For the buttercream roses I just used a couple of piping tips….Wilton 103 and 104. The petal tips are in the 101, 102, 103 etc etc range and as the number gets bigger so does the tip size. They graduate very gently so you REALLY don’t need all of them…just a couple of sizes will take you a long way!
The leaf tips I used were the Wilton 366 (larger) and the 352 (smaller). These are pretty basic tips so if you don’t yet have any you might want to look at just getting a basic tip set. Remember to keep one of the points at the top as you pipe…and I show you slowly in my Christmas Tree and Christmas Wreath video on my channel. See what else you can do with the leaf tips here: Wilton leaf piping tips
I have popped a couple of affiliate links below of the basic tools. I do get a pay back (pennies …trust me!) so please don’t feel you have to use my links although it is a good way to show you what I use and the price isn’t any different. The Wilton 22 piece sets don’t have exactly the tips I used but they have petal tips and leaf tips and come with flower nail and coupler set. So if you want to do all the piping basics but don’t want to go for a more expensive set…it’s all there and I would highly recommend them.
The larger Wilton set is GLORIOUS (I have it if course) and if you want to be a DIVA go for it. Even if you go on piping for EVER you have enough in there to not get bored! And you can see properly how I used all of those tools and how I assembled the cake in my YouTube video here.
