Happy (politically incorrect) Easter!!!!

A very happy Easter to all of you! Or Passover, whichever one you celebrate. Or, if you don't celebrate either one, you can take this post as a spring thing too (; Or, if you hate spring, it's just a floral post. And if you hate flowers as well... Then there's nothing I can do. Go reread a non-floral/springy post.

See how I appeal to all people? I can be very politically correct when I want to (;

Let's stray away from these political correct/incorrect things and start our cake. Because no matter what, cake is ALWAYS correct (;

Here is our lovely ganached cake. I think I have gotten considerably better at ganaching ever since our Mini Cake disaster. The lines are there on purpose.

Because that pretty plastic paper underneath is a guideline for this pretty design called a basket weave. Just to give you an idea on what that is, here's my practice board for it:

It's going to make the cake look like a basket. (: So with the guidelines on the paper, I made marks on the cake to provide a guide for the basket. 

Then on one of those lines I drew a long icing strip using Tip 47*

Then on that line I drew a horizontal line across it. Pay attention now, or else you'll miss it. The horizontal line will be drawn across the vertical line, half of it on either side. Then underneath of the end of either side of the line, there's a little dot. Then once the lines are drawn all the way down the side of the cake, another vertical line goes above the end of the lines. And you go again.

This is just a quick overview on the basket weave**, but I'll explain step by step with better pictures on a later date. After a long painstaking time icing the cake, it turned out like this:

I also used Tip 22 to create the shell border at the bottom and Tip 16 to create the shell border on top.

And of course, no cake looks perfect without a couple of touch ups. So to stay in the Easter/spring theme, I chose flowers***. And I pulled out my handy dandy fondant to make some flowers. (;

First, I needed some flowers to cover the defects in the basket.

I cut out a bunch of small purple flowers then came along with a little wooden ball tool to poke a shape into the flower.

I left the flowers drying into that shape, and once they dried, I came with the Tip1 and made little dots inside the flower as stamen.

There were also little green leaves that got glued on behind the flowers. Those were made using cutters (I'm not THAT artistic now. I wish I was though. Then I could get a knife and cut perfect leaves out of fondant =D)

And of course, the magic of cakes and fondant is that whenever there's a mistake, you just use some other piece of decoration to cover it up. So whenever there was a line that was too wiggly or didn't meet with the next part, I put a flower over it to cover the imperfection.

By using pretty decorations, we can make imperfections look perfect (:

But even as lovely as the sides look, we need to make the top look a little less bland, because even as delicious as that ganache looks, it's not Easter-y/springy enough. So the solution is....

Daisies (: Now here's something you should know. I LOVE daisies****. Especially when they're fondant. I have nothing against real daisies or other fondant flowers, but there's something about fondant daisies that is just very appealing to me. I don't know if it's how cutadorgeous***** they are, or how easy they are to make, or how easily they fit in with other flowers, but they're just awesome.

Now these four were pre-made (by me, not a store). I don't know why, but every time I make daisies, there always seems to be a leftover or two (or in this case 4). But still, these four weren't enough so I went and made lots more.

I cut the daisy shapes out from the white fondant and put them to dry on those spoons and white shaping cups (both meant to shape the flowers, just in case you didn't catch that). Once they dried, I created the center part with yellow icing again.

I ended up using a different daisy shape than last time to shape the daisies, so I had multi-sized daisies (which worked out great).

After making the flowers, I just arranged them nicely on the cake.

I put a big daisy in the center with lots of little daisies surrounding it.

That was the main focus for the cake, then I just went along the border with the rest of daisies, still creating an appealing look by spacing out the big daisies among the small daisies.

And of course, I also used those lovely daisies to cover a few imperfections, which most certainly were not as bad as the ones on the sides.

This was our final Easter/spring cake (:

My family had the pleasure of eating this 4 layer chocolate, yellow, chocolate, yellow, ganache-filled flower basket. Not that the kids needed anymore chocolate... They certainly got more than enough chocolate to last them the rest of the year. Eh, but hey, it's Easter. Enjoy yourselves (:

*If you're not acquainted with icing numbers, then this probably makes no sense to you. But for now all you gotta know is that different tips create different designs. I might or might not explain them better later.

**If you don't like my instructions, you can see Wilton's here.

***Well, if I'm making a basket I might as well put flowers in it (:

****What isn't cute about this???

I don't think they're as cute as the fondant ones, but they're still adorable in real life.

*****Cute, adorable, gorgeous

Yes, I do realize that this was posted the day after Easter, but I was busy feeding little kids chocolate-yellow-chocolate-yellow ganached cake on Easter, so the post had to wait one day.