Every Diva needs a cake

Seeing as my daughter Paige is a cake & cupcake baker/decorator... I needed to pull out my A-game today for her birthday cake.  I'm going to be generous and give myself a B- (smile).  I had fun doing it, but the execution was messy to say the least.  You may have seen these rosette cakes on Pinterest, or in a You Tube how-to video, where they take about a minute and a half to do a whole cake?  Well, it actually does go pretty quickly, but my icing started getting a bit too warm (white chocolate buttercream!) and I literally had icing up to my elbows, and had to refridgerate it several times.  Anyway, if you stand back about 5 feet it looks quite impressive... just don't sneak up close to see my shaky roses!

Cake, anyone?

When my daughter & I signed up to do the Wilton Level 2 cake decorating class, it seemed like May would be the perfect time to do it... ha!  We turned out to be crazy busy, lots of activities by all family members, me working more than normal and driving everyone all over the place.  Oh well, amidst it all we learned how to make little gum paste flowers and the classic roses.  Tonight was our grand finale where we each made a cake using flowers we'd made earlier in the course.  We were a little rushed getting cakes baked & iced, and making multiple batches of buttercream icing, so our cakes were pretty quickly thrown together, but we are pretty pleased with the results.  First, here is Paige's cake (she's 14):

And here's mine, I went the gum paste route, just don't look too closely at my first attempt at a basketweave: