Winter One-derland Rosette Smash Cake

It's hard to believe that Miss Bianca is almost one! Well, she will be one by the time this post goes live. It really doesn't seem like it's been a year since she was born but the calendar tells me otherwise. I love birthdays, I love an excuse to make a cake, and since the pictures of Roman's cake smash were so cute I knew I had to do one for Bianca! This was my first attempt at a rosette cake but I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out!

 

I started by baking three 4" vanilla cakes and whipping up a batch of vanilla buttercream. I stacked the cakes on top of each other with layers of buttercream in between, and gave the entire cake a crumb coat. A crumb coat is a thin coat of buttercream that essentially locks in the crumbs of the cake so they don't end up in the final coat of icing.

While the cake chilled in the freezer for a few minutes, I filled a piping bag fitted with a 1M tip, with some of the buttercream. Making a rosette cake is super easy. To make each rosette you want to write a 6 with the icing, but start in the centre instead of at the top like you typically would. Pipe a row of rosettes along the bottom of the cake. For the second row, stagger the rosettes in between the first row. You can the rosettes to overlap a bit and cover up the entire surface of the cake. Continue staggering rosettes until the entire cake is covered. I decorate the cake a few days early so I popped it into the freezer. The buttercream seals in the cake so it will taste fresh when it's time to eat it!

You can't have a winter one-derland cake without snowflakes! I decided to use royal icing to pipe snowflakes. Now I am not very good at free-handing anything, so I printed off some snowflake silhouettes I found online. I placed the images under a sheet of parchment paper and trice right over top with the royal icing. I did the same for the number 1 cake topper. They all turned out great! Make sure to make extra snowflakes because you will have casualties. Once the 1 was filled in, I laid a lollipop stick on the back and covered it with more royal icing. They took a good 12 hours to set but they turned out perfect.

The day before the cake smash, I took the cake out of the freezer and let it thaw on the counter. Once the buttercream softened up a bit, I attached the snowflakes to the cake with a small amount of royal icing and stuck the topper into the cake. Now it's time to smash!!

Bianca had a blast smashing her cake. At first she was a little hesitant like she wasn't sure if she should be touching it or not, but that didn't last long. She snapped off the topper and then went to town. After Bianca had a good go at the cake we let Roman get in there too. The pair of them had a blast chowing down on cake and screaming with delight. I would make a cake every week to see them both this happy.

Now that the cake smash is done, it's time to get ready for the main event!

Roman's smash cake: http://spontaneouslycreative.blogspot.ca/2014/07/a-cake-without-future.html