This weekend I made a cake, because my parents’ church was honoring a retiring missionary couple. I was just going to make some generic flowers, and then I thought ‘no! they’re coming from overseas to Texas! it should be a Texas cake!’ And then I spent an hour or so looking at pictures of flowers and cakes with flowers on them. I couldn’t find another cake with bluebonnets that seems satisfactory, and the more I looked at pictures of real bluebonnets the more baffled I was by the shape of their petals, so finally I winged them, because nothing is more Texan than a Texas Bluebonnet:
I made these decorations out of fondant, using just my hands and toothpicks and a knife. If you ever feel like you can’t use fondant because you don’t have special fancy tools, that’s nonsense! Flashback to your childhood Play-Doh experience and just jump in.
I also made a couple of Indian Blanket flowers, which are everywhere in Texas during the spring:
And just to drive the point home, I added Texas itself, with a heart. And this cake is also for all of you guys, because guess what?
Someone in Texas loves you!
(P.S. It is me. I love you)
Domestic Warrior Goddess 
That’s amazing! YOU’RE amazing!
Aw, thank you!
Hahaha! I LOVE it! How do you win at both baking and decorating AND blogging?
Thanks! :D I do not know how I win at these things, I will let you know once I manage it?
This is the most amazing cake I’ve ever seen! Seriously! I love love love the swirls in the icing and everything about the blue bonnets. You are so talented, Charis!
Thank you so much! :D I definitely swirl icing as my default cake style–if you like I can show you when I come to SF!
It looks so lovely, sisiet! I love the bluebonnets, they look perfect!
Thanks! <3
Wow, that looks great – I’ve never used fondant before, but this definitely makes me want to give it a go! (I saw a “how to make a fondant Totoro” tutorial years ago and always thought that’d be fun to try.)
Technical question: how did you get the edges of the colours in the two-tone petals on the Indian Blankets so neat? It looks like a single piece, but I imagine you start with two separate pieces of the different colours.
Thanks! Fondant is a lot of fun–I was terrified of using it, and I still haven’t attempted to cover a cake with it or anything like that, but I love making decorations out of it! It really is just like making things out of Play-Doh or clay (you just have to be more careful not to let fondant dry out while you work).
Let me see if I can explain what I did in a way that’s coherent :P what I did for the Indian Blankets was to make a small ball out of the center color, the red, and then I made a thin snake of yellow and wrapped it in a ring around the ball of red–like a planet–and rolled it flat so that the two colors smooshed together.
I did something similar to get the white part of the bluebonnet–I took a bit of blue, rolled it into a ball, flattened it with the heel of my hand, then put a tiny ball of white onto it and flatted it again before I molded the resulting disc into a bluebonnet petal.
….does that make sense? I thought about making a tutorial, but I’m not sure pictures would be much clearer (maybe a video?)
Perfect sense, thanks! :-)
This cake looks good! I could not believe you made the decorations with just your hands. A toothpick and a knife. You are really creative and resourceful.