A Floral 21st Birthday Cake

One of the major things that i was doing during the month of October was planning, designing, doing taste-trials for my friend's 21st birthday cake. Gladly, i wasn't doing all of these by myself; i had J to share the load and keep me company (since it was a shared project). The whole process was a fun and worthy experience, even though it took away some of our sleep time and energy. Despite being faced with some uncertainties and failures on the way, those 31 hours of hard work definitely paid off. The cake turned out very pretty (both of us couldn't stop saying '...so pretty, so pretty') and the birthday girl really liked it too.

I also decided to submit this blog post as part of The Nuffnang October Blogger Challenge because i thought that the cake & cupcakes were so pretty that i would totally take them to the Mad Hatter's Tea Party. The cupcakes have beautiful pastel colours and delicate flower decorations that especially suits a spring season tea party.

The journey started when we accepted the birthday girl's request to make her 21st birthday cake. At first, it sounded cool and fun but when we actually stopped to think about it we were like "Wait...it's her 21st birthday cake, not any other cake that we usually make". The birthday girl was going to hold a sit-down dinner for 50 or so guests, so we couldn't just make any Michel-Patisserie-like cake. It had to be displayed during the dinner, pretty, tasty and something that would feed 50+ guests. I immediately knew what we were dealing with...Fondant Cakes! Neither J or myself had ever made a fondant cake before, so we started to do heaps of research and watch Youtube videos about fondant cakes.

The birthday girl wanted green tea-flavoured cakes so we ended up making a White Chocolate Green Tea Mud Cake (main cake) and Green Tea cupcakes. We adapted the recipes from the book Planet Cake - A beginner's guide to decorating incredible cakes by Paris Cutler. We basically just added green tea powder to the recipes and reduced the amount of sugar needed in them. It's definitely a great book for beginners (like us) who are interested in cake decorating!

With everything ready and set to go, it took us 3 days to finish our little work of art! Let the journey begin...

Day One

We made the mud cake (as it can be stored longer) and coloured 6kgs of fondant to the colours needed: pale green and four shades of pink. That was a lot of muscle work involved! We were both pretty exhausted by the end of day...

Mud Cake Batter

The different coloured fondants

Day Two

That's when we made 6 batches of cupcakes (86 cupcakes in total), brushed them with syrup and covered all of them with white chocolate ganache.

Testing the batch of green tea cupcakes

Brushing the green tea cupcakes with syrup before ganaching them

Day Three

This day was entirely dedicated for decorating the mud cake and the cupcakes. We rolled out some pale green fondant and cut them into circles to cover the cupcakes. We also rolled out a massive 'sheet' of pale green fondant to cover the main cake and then, we put edible pale gold ribbon around the bottom rim of the mud cake. 

Cupcakes covered by pale green fondant

Covering the White Chocolate Green Tea Mudcake with Fondant. It wasn't as daunting as we thought afterall...

Covered mud cake with edible pale gold ribbon

We cut out a few hundreds of flower-shaped decorations to be used on cupcakes and the mud cake. All flowers were brushed with white shimmering glitter for a prettier finish and some flowers were decorated with metallic cachous.

Cutting flower-shaped decorations

More pretty flower decorations

In process of decorating the main cake

Finished cupcakes! I think it was past midnight when we finished all  them...

Day Three was probably the most fun and rewarding day for both of us as we got to see the final product! Yey!
It was such an accomplishment for us, i have to say. *tears...J also tears...

More photos of the finishing product...

Sorry for the long post, just felt like a proud mum!