This is again an article about making flowers from buttercream. Since my blogpost about a beginner’s guide to buttercream flowers is so popular, I decided to make another for a bit more advanced buttercream decorators. Yes, I am aware that Mother’s Day is around the corner. Probably no better time than now to practice making flowers with buttercream. Have you ever tried to pipe anything with buttercream? If you have, you probably have your share of fails, for me the biggest fail was the new buttercream I wanted to try. It basically consists of melted white chocolate and butter. But boy, everything went wrong, I was so disappointed. Believe me, I still experience bake fails, this one was one of them. But I decided to keep digging, so after a lot of reasearch I found another buttercream. Not American buttercream, which seems to be the go-to buttercream for super sturdy buttercream. I find American buttercream way too sweet. For these flowers you would need to add even more icing sugar, so this was off the table. But below recipe works like a charm. I deliberately decided to post my first attempt at three-dimensional flowers here, I know I can still improve a lot, but I wanted to give you a glimpse of what you can do with a palette knife if practicing for a little. So do you want to become an artist and pull out those palette knives?
Let me introduce you to this festive single-tier (wedding) cake adorned with a world map crafted from buttercream—a true masterpiece! In this reel you may get an impression. You may think of this as an impressionistic painting, with the cake serving as my canvas. Like an artist, I dabbed at the cake; however, instead of using oil paints, my tool was buttercream. Yes, I designed it freehand using buttercream. Initially, I delicately carved out the outlines of the world map onto the cake’s side using a toothpick, and then I filled them with white buttercream. The most fun part was when I deftly “spackled” the cake with colored buttercream, much like applying layers to a canvas. The lower image shows this technique.
Initially, I was thinking of using a “stencil,” but I ultimately abandoned the idea due to the fact that the cake’s proportions might not align well. The crucial point is that the cake’s size should adapt to the stencil, rather than the reverse. My cake had a diameter of 26cm and was about 14cm in height. The cake was designed to accommodate 25 guests. In this post, I will elaborate on how I created this world map cake. My focus will be more on detailing how I crafted the map using buttercream, rather than providing an exhaustive recipe description.
Today my blog is turning six years. Who would have thought! When the lemon tarts went online on February 15, 2017, I thought I would only bake other recipes. I thought I would focus on cookies (big cookie monster speaking) and I would not create anything myself. Yes, I did publish my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe soon on, which was around the 20th recipe I had tested. But I soon realized that I started modifying recipes. Either because Americans tend to overdo it with sugar. All American recipes needed a reduction of sugar to accommodate my tastebuds. Or I had to modify the recipe because I had problems, didn’t find the exact same ingredient in Germany, etc.
My first blog post: French lemon tarts
We finally need another German recipe on the blog, for that reason you will get the typical Snow White Cake aka Donauwelle. But I am serving this classic with a twist, you will get it with strawberries instead of cherries. This cake contains a marbled cake base (another super German recipe) into which you press some cherries (normally), followed by a layer of German buttercream and topped off with a chocolate layer. Beside the Black Forest Cake this Snow White Cake is super German for me. But since I was not in the mood for canned cherries, I decided to use a lot of fresh strawberries, so my buttercream contains chunks of strawberry. The chocolate layer also has some strawberries tucked inside. Because why not? Continue Reading…
Have I mentioned that I hate fondant? I really don’t get it. You see a wedding cake with fondant and you know that whoever made that cake spent hours and hours on beautiful decoration with the fondant, there are flowers and little figures and you can only imagine how many hours it must have taken to prepare them. But what happens next, you see that all the guests happily reach for a piece and quickly get rid of the fondant because it is so ultra sweet. Nobody wants to eat it. I find that extremely sad. I will always say that flavor is so much more important than looks. But this does not mean that a flavorful cake needs to look boring! That’s why today I am going to introduce to you how to make flowers with buttercream. Below you will find lots of helpful tips and tricks and also a video for you to practice making different flowers with buttercream.
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Aren’t these sheep cupcakes the cutest? I am telling you, these are definitely a show-stopper, for Easter, but probably also for a baby shower. You get a super delicious vanilla cupcake with Italian buttercream, which serves as the fur, yum! This is a simple and plain cupcake dressed up to be all fancy for Easter. I’d say, you are all set, aren’t you?
Has it ever happened to you that you were checking strawberry macaron recipes and you thought that the bright colors they came in were actually real? How disappointed was I when I learned that about 90% of all the color is actually from food coloring! That’s why today I am going to give you the real deal. These strawberry macarons really taste like strawberry because, well the buttercream IS full of strawberries. I didn’t color the macaron shells red, well, because I am hosting a blog event, in which I ask you not to use artifical food coloring when presenting a recipe in mainly one rainbow color and because this would be fake.
Below banana layer cake was one of the cakes I made for my coffee invite event, which took place on March 3. Can I tell you a little secret? It is soooo good. If you like bananas in a cake, this one is for you. My guests really loved it!