Red Velvet Rose Cake for Inner Wheel

In May I was asked to recreate the red velvet rose cake from My Best Friend’s Wedding Cake by the mother of the bride for a luncheon of the local Inner Wheel group in August.

The cake was to be predominately the same as the wedding cake, however as the symbol of the Inner Wheel is a red rose, a few of these were scattered in amongst the white.

The ingredients were identical to that used for the wedding cake so I will not reinvent the wheel so to speak, but please read that post if you are interested.  As mentioned in that original post, this time I used buttercream as the crumb coat which worked a lot better.

To get the red roses I tested a couple of options.  The first was using some of the excess red food colouring I acquired for the wedding cake.  I had to keep adding lots of the colouring to try and get a nice red colour, however the addition of all of this liquid affected the buttercream and it started to split.

My next test was using powdered food colouring.  Once again a lot was going to be required, which I didn’t really have at the time, and I wasn’t happy with the colour it was producing anyway.

I was also going to try using gel food colouring however as red happens to be the most popular colour I wasn’t able to get any.  However the ever so helpful woman at the shop pointed me into the direction of some ready made red buttercream.  It was the perfect colour so my search was over.

Once again I made a 8″ and 12″ cake.  I piped the red roses on first, with three on top of each of the cakes and a few single ones around the edge.  Once these were set, I piped the rest of the cake in white.

When all of the roses were set, I used some red glitter, which was kindly loaned to me by one of the women attending the luncheon, to accentuate the red roses.

I had only used edible glitter once before when I went to a cake decorating class so I made sure piped a few red roses onto a plate to use as my testing roses.  I tried both the red and gold glitter, but the gold was a bit to blingy for me and the red just highlighted the roses perfectly when they caught the light.

To look a little professional, I purchased some cake boxes and made a couple of labels.  The cakes were then boxed up and delivered.

I hope the cake went down a treat with the women at the luncheon.