-I Made Myself a Birthday Cake! Mystical Garden Cake with Buttercream Roses _ Georgia's Cakes.

Hey guys, welcome back to my channel and welcome to my new kitchen. I moved into this new apartment one week ago so I thought I'd give you a sneak peek into the kitchen. You can see it's not 100% ready but I didn't want to miss the opportunity to show you how I made my mystical garden birthday cake. If you follow me on Instagram you may have seen the process of me making this cake and of course it was you guys who helped me choose the design what I would make for my birthday. So lots of you wanted me to do a detailed tutorial of how I made this cake so here it is. I did shoot it on my phone so it's going to look a little bit different to my normal tutorials but I will do my best to explain every step of the way from the ombre sky nighttime buttercream to each individual hand-piped rose as well as the pipe decoration and how I put it all together. I hope you enjoy it and we'll see you very soon for more tutorials from this very kitchen and once again thank you all for your birthday wishes too. So I'm going to start off with my bottom tier which is an eight inch cake so this is also a 20 centimeter cake and I've written all the quantities in the comments box below. For this tutorial I'm going to be using ready crumb coated cakes. If you want to see the best way how to crumb coat a cake then check out my other tutorials on my channel. So as I said this is going to be the bottom tier. Now I want the whole cake to go from a lighter blue to a dark purple so I'm going to go on with my light blue buttercream around the bottom but I'm also going to go on with a slightly darker shade too. The reason why I want to put on both of these shades is even though I'm doing an ombre effect and you may have seen my ombre cake video I still want it to be a little bit more blended and for there to be a more gradual difference in the shades of colors so I'm going to do almost like a watercolor effect at the same time as the ombre. So I'm going on with the lighter shades of blues and the top part of the tier I'm going to start introducing some medium shades of blue. So as you can see already in just this one tier I'm changing from the lighter shades to the darker shades. Once I've covered the majority of the sides I'm going to add some buttercream on the top of the cake too and then using the side edge of my palette knife I'm going to make that top extremely flat as well as bringing the buttercream over the edges because this is going to create my sharp filled in corners of the cake. You almost want this overspill of buttercream to happen. And now it's time to use my scraper so I now refer to this as a smoother rather than a scraper because I want to smooth out the buttercream rather than scrape it off. I'm making sure my scraper is straight keeping the bottom corner of the scraper against the bottom corner of the cake and angling the scraper towards me about 45 degrees so it's not perpendicular to the cake. If you do this you tend to scrape off more buttercream than you want. I just want to be redistributing the buttercream and smoothing it out and as you can see as I do this the colors start blending together and you can also see the gradual change in shades of blue too. Just going to fill a couple of areas where I can see there are pockets of buttercream. It doesn't really matter what shade of blue because like I said I want a blend anyway. So I'm applying them again with my palette knife and then going once again with my scraper until I get a smooth finish. To get rid of any smaller holes or air bubbles I like to do longer strokes with the scraper so I'm bringing my left hand at the back of the turntable coming on with a scraper with a movement bringing the turntable all the way around and then coming off with the scraper with a movement. If you don't come off with a movement you might get one of those lines. Now this does take practice it took me years to perfect that skill but those longer strokes really help. And now I can clean off the top corners so using the side edge of my palette knife going from the outside into the center of the cake and cleaning off that excess buttercream. Scraping the buttercream off from my palette knife onto the scraper every time otherwise you put on more buttercream and then have to go around the sides again. So now the top is smooth the corners are sharp and I'm going to be setting this in the fridge until I'm ready to stack the cake. The middle layer of my birthday cake was one of my regular six inch cakes. Now you may see that the buttercream is slightly pink and this is because I'm actually reusing one of our demonstration cakes from Baker Street, my workshop studio. It was from the workshop the day before I made this cake and we weren't doing anything with the cake so I scraped off the outer layer of buttercream and reused it for my birthday cake. I'm all for reusing cakes. So now I'm focusing on the medium to darker shades of blue. So once again I'm going to go around the bottom with a more of a medium shade of blue and then start introducing a slightly darker shade and then at the very top I'm also going to start introducing the purple. Not so much but I do want the shade of blue to get dark before I introduce the purple on the top tier. Once again I'm going to add buttercream to the very top, rotate the cake and use my palette knife to make it nice and flat, push that buttercream over the corners before I start smoothing. Now before I went around with my scraper I did actually want to top up with a few more shades of blue before I did so. Now I can go with my scraper and smooth out the sides like I did the last time. I find smoothing out coloured buttercream a lot easier because you've mixed in the colour you've almost knocked out a lot of the air in the buttercream and so it smooths out a lot easier. Once again I'm doing the longer strokes to make a smooth finishing touch and of course touch up any holes that aren't being filled in by the scraper. And once I was happy with the outside I tidied up the top corners once again making sure the top of the cake is extremely flat which is very important for a tiered cake and take it to the fridge to be extremely cold and start on my final layer which is the four inch. And once again I've written the quantities of baking a four inch sponge cake down below. For the four inch I can go straight on with a darker shade of blue and then start introducing the purple. What I like doing especially with ombre buttercream is taking the two shades so for example here it's blue and purple and then getting a third bowl and mixing those two shades and that's kind of this in between colour. So I've got this bluey purpley shade going on in the middle as well as the darker purple on the top and this is the darker shade of buttercream so I'm going to finish off with that. Smooth out the top once again flat out the very top of the cake using my palette knife before taking my scraper and smoothing out the sides. So you may have already seen my stacking cake tutorial but if not I should let you know that the four inch and the six inch is on its own sized cake board as well as a bigger cake board that you can see in the video. The reason for this is because when it comes to stacking the cake board sits on the straws that are in between each tier not the actual cake itself. I'll go into a little bit more detail when I come to stack the cake. When I'm filling up the holes of buttercream I don't really mind what shade of blue or purple I'm using because once again it will just add to this watercolour effect and you can see the blending has actually come out really nicely. A couple of slower turns before I clean off the very top corners with my palette knife and set this tier in the fridge until it's 100% completely firm. So when it comes to stacking tiers of cakes it's really important to make sure your tiers are extremely cold so they don't move around when you stack them and you prevent things like finger marks and it just makes the job a lot easier. Because I have this time I can now get on with my buttercream flowers. So I actually am using three different sizes of petal tips here so the regular size I usually use is a 104 but I've also got a 103 and 102 which make the same shape but just in different sizes. I have a very in-depth tutorial of how to pipe these buttercream roses so if you haven't already then go ahead on my channel and check that out. But what I did here was I created a few different shades of purples, whites, peaches and created a lot of roses. I probably should have counted how many. I didn't but I think there was close to 40 maybe even 50 individual roses. I didn't want to hold back for this cake. So each rose is being piped on a small piece of parchment paper which I'm transferring to a small chopping board and these are going to set in the freezer to completely firm up before I apply them to the cake. Once again firm buttercream makes everything a lot easier. So I did a mixture of larger roses and some smaller roses and even some rose buds of like two or three petals just to vary the size because it's going to add to the effect and make it a little bit more natural and organic looking. Piping these roses alone took me about an hour so if you think you're taking too long when it comes to piping buttercream flowers you probably aren't. This does take patience. So I'm going to set these in the freezer for about half an hour to make sure they're completely firm before I decorate the cake with them. So now it's time to stack the cake. So once again each tier is extremely cold. They've been in the fridge for about an hour and a half maybe even two hours so the buttercream is completely firm. What you can't see on this video is that in this tier I put about six straws. These straws are what's going to hold the cake up. When you make a tiered cake you don't want any pressure or weight on the actual cake itself. Just make sure you tell this to whoever you're giving the cake to because a straw or an extra cake board might come as a surprise to them. So to secure the middle tier I'm putting a little bit of buttercream on top of the eight inch cake. I'm then going to carefully take the six inch cake on its six inch cake board that I decorated it on, carefully lift it up and place it on the cake. You may also notice that I'm not using a central dowel. Now a central dowel is a big stick that runs through the entire cake so I only use a central dowel when firstly I'm giving a tiered cake to someone else because it's their responsibility to get the cake as a whole to the venue but also if I know it's going to be traveling far. This cake was going in the car with me for about 10 minutes and so it is secure without that central dowel. So I'm centering this six inch tier just by poking the bottom cake board with the palette knife rather than the cake itself. I'm not too worried about the gaps in between the tiers at this point because I'm going to fill them in in a moment. I just want to stack the three tiers whilst they're still cold. So same again with the four inch, a little bit of buttercream before I put the top tier on. Check it central and level and now I can fill in those gaps in between the tiers. Now because this is a blended colour cake it's actually a lot easier to fill in these gaps because it doesn't really matter what colour buttercream I'm going to use. If it's all the same colour for example you'll want to use that same colour. If it's stripes or with a drip, well that's a different story. But for this cake I'm going on with a lighter shade of blue between the eight inch and the six inch cake. Just a thin layer filling in that gap in between using just the tip of my palette knife because I don't need to apply a lot here and then smoothing out with the scraper. And then the same thing for the top tier so I'm going to be using a darker shade of blue here, fill in that gap and then scrape it smooth. So the only thing you need to be careful here is to not scrape any buttercream off from the tier below with your scraper. So don't put much pressure on the bottom of the scraper at this point, it's just to push in that buttercream on the sides. Saying this, like I say in most of my cake videos, you can always hide things. So if there's one bit that isn't playing, well that's where the rose is gonna go. So just before I add the flower decorations I'm just going to add a little bit of detail using some white food colouring and a paintbrush. To add to this sort of midnight mystical effect I want to splatter on tiny dots of white. You may not see this very well in the video but it kind of resembles stars and reminds me of when the sun has just set and you start seeing the stars in the sky. So I'm using a dry paintbrush and flicking this food colouring only over the purple bits and it just adds a nice mystical detail. This is a great technique if you're doing a sort of galaxy cake too with gold or even silver edible paint. So now it's time to add the floral decoration. Before I go on with the flowers I want to apply some greenery. So I've got a few different shades of green in some piping bags with small round tips and I didn't really have a plan here. I did want it to look quite wild so I started piping on some random lines of green going up and down each tier. I do like having a kind of collection of decoration especially over a tiered cake so I'm going to keep that in mind as I'm piping on this greenery. It doesn't matter if they're overlapping, if they're not straight, if they're different sizes, it's all adding to this wild effect and at the moment it doesn't look like much. It kind of actually looks like a haunted woodland scene but as soon as I start adding the roses it will transform it completely. So I've got the roses straight from the freezer, they're nice and hard and I can simply pick them up and stick them straight to that buttercream. The buttercream is going to act like an adhesive so I don't need to apply any more buttercream just yet. So I'm using a variation of different sizes and colours of the roses and if I do need to add some buttercream I do so with the green because it doesn't matter if that's seen as it will just hide amongst the other decorations. So I'm placing some roses going up the cake and dropping down a bit and keeping to these three clusters where I drew all the greenery. If at any point you feel that your buttercream flowers are softening you can just put them straight back in the freezer and wait another five minutes. I did have the air conditioning blasting so they were able to hold their shape pretty well but once they're on the cake and stuck properly with buttercream they're not going to fall or drip, they really do hold their shape. So I loved how this was looking and I really didn't want to stop. I was overlapping some of the roses which kind of creates a more filler effect and of course using buttercream to stick them on if I had to. So I know I've said this before but it is really important to know when to stop because otherwise it can be overkill. The last decoration I'm going to do with the buttercream is pipe on some small leaves. So I've got a small leaf tip here with the same shades of green that I was using before and I'm going to use some of the green stalks as a guide to where I'm going to pipe them so it really does start to look like a rosebush. Once again in no particular order, in fact the more random the better because it will look more organic and the different shades of greens really help it make it look more natural. So just a few more leaves and then I'm done. But of course this is my birthday cake and what's a Georgia's birthday cake without some edible glitter? This edible glitter really made the cake come alive and scream out a mystical rose garden. And there you go, my mystical rose garden birthday cake. I hope you enjoyed watching the process of me making this cake, I certainly enjoyed the process of eating it. Thank you so much for watching, I can't wait to share with you more videos from my new kitchen. As always please subscribe to my channel, like this video and comment below with any other tutorials that you want to see and in the meantime see you very soon!