i'm making roses cakes in florist boxes and i need to make 12 doz of these cakes who soon can i make them and whats the best way to store them

You can make them ahead and freeze them.

Bc roses last a long time. Let them air dry - do not freeze them. (Compare it to the many many threads in which FBCT are discussed and the advice given is "work fast because it starts to melt almost right away". Well, the same is true for roses made of the same kind of icing!)

Air drying also allows the moisture to evaporate, leaving the rose a much lighter-weight. When I make mine in the morning, I can pick them up and throw them across the room by afternoon.

Once they are dry enough to handle, I'd store them in a box ... sheet cake box, for example, (so they are covered and won't collect dust. )

Do they have to be buttercream? If you can consider royal icing roses so you can store them easily.

thanks for the tips they don't have to be buttercream i could do royal its just that for some reason i have i harder time with ri roses!!!!!!

It must depend on the type of icing you use, Debi - I use an all-butter buttercream and they *never* get that hard (kind of why I like it)

Had this exact same issue a few months back.

I had about 10 dozen mums that had to be done for a wedding cake last fall. I don't work with royal icing unless I absolutely have to so I chose to use air dried buttercream.

I used the "Snow White Buttercream" recipe from the Wilton website. I don't normally use that recipe but heard it worked very well for air dried buttercream (and it did). I just used regular Crisco for it (I use high ratio and a completely different recipe for my regular icing)

http://www.wilton.com/recipes/recipesandprojects/icing/snow.cfm

I made all of my mums on little wax paper squares and then put them on cookie sheets to dry.

After they were dry (they don't take long...maybe 24 hours max), I put them in clean, disinfected egg cartons to store them. It worked absolutely perfect!!

I did my mums about 10 days before the wedding, it's my understanding that air dried buttercream does not last indefinitely like royal so I wanted to be on the safe side.

Here is a link to a recipe for air-dried buttercream:
http://www.cakecentral.com/cake_recipe-2278-Airdried-Buttercream-Icing.html

oooohhh great thanks what would we do with out our friends!!!!11

Air drying also allows the moisture to evaporate, leaving the rose a much lighter-weight. When I make mine in the morning, I can pick them up and throw them across the room by afternoon.

how funny!!!!