Hi all.

I have done some reading here and think I have a solution to my question but perhaps someone who works with ganache regularly can help me solve a challenge.

I am making a fall themed cake for our Thanksgiving dinner this weekend. I was thinking a light chocolate cake with a buttercream crumb coat and then chocolate ganaache over the entire cake. To go with the fall theme I was thinking of placing a bunch of silk flowers - probably 3 lillies in fall colours and some fall leaves - on the top of the cake wrapping the base of the cake in a complementing ribbon. I have read here that I should back the ribbon with wax paper or another similar product but how do I keep the chocolate ganache from colouring/staining the flowers? Should I put a circle of wax paper under the flowers or is there a more elegant way of doing this?

Thanks for the advice.

Any suggestions on how to keep ganache from bleeding into silk flowers on top of a cake?

I'm going to venture a guess that there really isn't a way to keep poured ganache from being ganache--which is a product with a high fat content. If you don't want the flowers to stick, then consider putting a disk of a crusting chocolate buttercream on the top of the cake where the flowers will lay. If you want to have something hard, you can use a 2:1 ganache that will set up firmer than a shiny poured ganache. If you sink a drinking straw into the cake for the base of your flower arrangement (you won't want to put wires in the cake anyway) then you can cut the stems so that most of the flowers will float above the cake and not make much contact anyway.

you can also make your own chocolate flowers by taking white, yellow, orange, brown candy melts and coating faux leafs on one side as a mold. Then you peel the leaf off the chocolate and you have a lovely, veined leaf that you can place directly on the cake and stay there as an edible part of the cake.

You can roll a circle of fondant or gum paste that's colored the same color as the ganache, place that on the cake and set your flowers on that. It should blend in nicely and your flowers can cover it. I would make certain that the fondant or gum paste circle was dry.

Thanks for the suggestions. I will try to colour a fondant circle to match.