Five Flowers

We take a break from our regularly-scheduled Halloween progress to wish Mary Jo a very Happy Birthday today! Here are the Five Flowers I made for her big birthday party a couple weeks ago!

During the summer Mary Jo requested I make “the cake” for her milestone birthday party in October, so of course I said yes, even though her only design concept at that point was “something elegant.” When a couple weeks before the party I asked her for any other inspiration and how big the cake needs to be, she said 75 people…ack! I’d never made that much cake for a single event before! She loves Georgia O’Keefe’s flower paintings, and I looked up that five 2-layer rounds should feed 75 people okay, so we agreed on representing her five favorite Georgia O’Keefe flowers on five cakes. That also gave easy flavor options: two devil’s food, two white, and one pistachio Aunt Sassy’s cake (yuck! glad she liked the results since I couldn’t tell!). Since the party was October 1st, I lost a a little over five days of Halloween project evenings to cake prep, but at least it was early in the season so I could adjust my schedule.

I often cut my own cake boards from scraps but this time I splurged on purchased cake rounds with a coupon. I covered five with foil and used those to sculpt the fondant flowers so they could dry in advance, then be transferred off the foil onto the freshly-baked cakes closer to the party. Then I made five whole batches of white marshmallow fondant and let the rest overnight in the fridge. By hand that would have taken hours but with my stand mixer it was only 90 minutes!

Tuesday evening I started sculpting. I originally thought I would do all the sculpting first, then painting the next night after the fondant had dried in shape, but as I started the first yellow flower with all the ruffles, I realized painting the lower layers before the upper layers were added was a better plan. 2 hours later, after quite a mixed palette of food coloring, the first flower was finished!

Each flower took about 2 hours to sculpt and paint. It was trickier than you’d think to translate painted flowers from the page to 3D, mostly because her style is so impressionistic and fluid. I chose specific details to reproduce as exactly as possible, then the fading petals and backgrounds usually fit in on their own.

The gorgeous blue hydrangeas were the hardest because I could not get food coloring to be the right color no matter what I tried! I got close enough, and they were still recognizable as the matching painting. The blue ones were devils food, the irises were white cake, and the yellow ruffled one was pistachio.

Friday night I finally started baking, and since I could only bake one cake at a time, that took awhile in itself! Then I had to mix up a ton of buttercream and frost them all. Ten hours and ten pounds of powdered sugar later, the cakes were ready for decoration. The one iris blended in too much with the frosting, so I used some food coloring sprays for a nice background. Yes that is purple added over the top to offset the neon green to more natural! I decided to add the flowers before the buttercream set so they would stay on, then I stashed them safely in the pantry away from kitties.

I was so glad the party wasn’t until the afternoon, since I actually got some decent sleep and was able to enjoy the party, including dancing and karaoke! Even after I was cutting and slicing for what seemed like forever, we had almost two whole cakes left! Definitely better than running out! Everyone loved the cakes, especially the birthday girl!

Click below to view all the photos of the Five Flowers…