Piping a Giant Rose

Oh my, when Bug said she wanted a giant flower cake with a bee on it my heart was happy because I had in mind just what I would do.  Something like this:

Which looked super impressive, but when it comes down to it, is quite simple.

However, when I showed her the picture (and it's always a good idea to check first with Bug, her needs and wants are VERY specific) she hated that and explained she wanted a giant flower with a bee on it.  OK I thought, I've seen tutorials online for piping a rose, I just need to do that with a really big nozzle.

Yes.  A really big one.

I had the bright idea that I could bake a hemispheric cake and use that as the base.  Then piping would be child's play, right?  Happily I could actually practise this one on the cake tin.  It didn't turn out too bad! One of my friends gave me the great tip of adding a spoonful of cream of tartar to the butter icing and this really helped give the tips a sharp edge and stiffened up the mixture enough to hold the shape. So when it came to the actual cake, I just did a crumb layer of icing and then went ahead.  The icing is coloured yellow, then I put a red stripe of icing inside the piping bag on the narrow side of the teardrop nozzle to give the petals a dark edge.

If I did it again, I would stop halfway and cool the icing down again before contiuing.  you can see where it all started to go pearshaped, but of course I was doing this the night before the party so didn't have time to be sensible.

I would post a recipe for the cake, but I won't because actually it was rank.  My first attempt at a lemon cake and it was horrible.  Luckily for me kids only want to eat the icing in any case.   I used butter icing with added cream of tartar and of course I added maple syrup as I always do!  The cake to icing ratio is rather outrageous in this case.  Don't look at the cake in this picture.  As I said, it was rank.

And the bee?  A good old cake pop.

There's a million tutorials out there for how to make cake pops so I won't add to the deluge. I used chocolate courgette cake for the filling and white chocolate coloured with yellow colouring for the coating.  I find it best to freeze the pops and coat them straight from the freezer in very small batches.  That way the chocolate hardens almost straight away and you can do another layer. However I will say that an upturned egg box weighted down with marbles makes a good holder for them.