Design Help . . . Roses And Musical Theme
Decorating By ckkerber Updated 15 Jul 2006 , 8:46pm by kerririchards
My sister-in-law's birthday is next week and I'm making a cake for her. She is very musical so I wanted to reflect that on the cake. And, she loves roses. My thought is to make an 8" round cake covered with white buttercream. On the top and bottom border, I wanted to have small red rose buds with vines and leaves draping down about 1/2 inch. Because the red and sage colors will stand out against the white, I don't want to go overboard with the musical notes so my thought was to pipe them around the outside of the cake, much like you would do swiss dots so it would be white on white. I'm just not sure if this will look right -- will the music notes conflict with the rose theme? Do the music notes need to be black so they're impacting? I'm trying to go simple but definitely want to keep both the roses and the musical theme. Ideas??? I have a little trouble with visualization and can't draw worth a darn so sketching ideas out doesn't really help me much. I'm counting on you all to be able to visualize this and share your feedback!
Roses and musical notes should go together just fine! If I were to do this cake I think I would make my musical notes black instead of white. If you want a diminsional twist..Color flow or royal ice some black music notes..when dry stand them up on top of the cake. - rhondie
I think your idea of white on white would work. To make the musical notes stand out more, how about piping them like the picture below?
I think it would look better if the notes weren't white, but I don't think they need to be black. Those wavy lines with notes around the sides would look great. You could always do the notes in the same color as your roses or vines.
In my photos, I made a cake for my DH's music assistant with a MMF treble clef standing in the middle of flowers. You can do that in the middle of roses. Or a couple of standing notes in the middle or around the cake. Just some ideas.
i don't know how big you want, but you could do an 8 inch with a 6 inch on top and have a cascade of red roses with black royal icing notes interspersed throughout
Thank you for all of the great ideas. I think I will do the notes in color after all. I originally was afraid of it becoming too busy of a cake, but that's because when I envision something, I have a hard time tweaking it or picturing it any other way on my own. All of your suggestions will really help me to pull this off. THANK YOU!
I don't know - I like the idea of black notes, but I think white on white would be really pretty! You could pipe your notes in royal icing (little bitty ones) and when they dry put them on the cake like you were saying with a swiss dot kind of pattern. Either way, black or white, will be pretty. I can't wait to see the picture!
Doug, you are so creative. You come up with the best ideas.
could the heads of the notes be the roses???
that would be cool! just to creative sometimes doug, how do you do it?
I have a lot of pictures with musical instruments/musical pictures and red roses, I guess it is classic.
I definitely like the white background with red roses and black musical notes, the colors are bold, but compliment eachother so well.
Can't wait to see your cake. I have been wanting to make one for my former Music teacher for one of her recitals. As she does 4 recitals throughout the year and I thought it would be a good thankyou to her for putting up with me for so long!
Leily
Even more great ideas. I am starting this cake tomorrow so I can't wait to see what I end up doing! I actually had an idea similar to Doug's based on everyone's feedback . . . I thought about making smaller rosebuds and placing those on the sides of the cake. Then, I'd use the sage green to make a "stem" coming up from the rosebud and then pipe a leaf at the top so it looks like a musical note. These would all be pretty small so they would be scattered around the side of the cake. I thought about then doing a leaf border around the top and bottom with a few larger roses sprinkled throughout the leaves. As I said, though, I'm not starting until tomorrow so this could all change! I do like the idea of making black notes to nestle into the roses on top, too, so if I don't do rosebud music notes on the side, I think I'll do the black notes. So many good options . . . thank you so much! unfortunately, I know that I'll be up tonight again with my mind racing instead of sleeping now that I've got so many different pictures of this cake in my head!
Finally, here is the finished cake. It took longer to do than I expected because my first design plan was flawed. My original plan was to scatter small rosebuds all over the sides of the cake and then pipe the stems and leaves to look like musical notes. Good plan and one I'll have to work on but when I did it, it just looked like i turned my cake upside down as they look like roses standing on their heads. SO, onto design #2 which turned out better . . . but I still need to work on my leveling (my cheapy Wilton leveler turned an almost level cake into the leaning tower of buttercream. Oh well. I discovered that if I leaned as much as the cake was leaning when I took the picture, you couldn't tell too much). I also have to work on my crumb coating. I did a crumb coat and still ended up with crumbs in the finished product. At least this cake was for family!
Thank you so much for your ideas and advice!
Great job! I was wondering what you had come up with!
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