The peony rose wedding cake was a lovely cake to make. It was the first wedding cake I'd been asked to cover with royal icing, I have done some training on royal icing but that was in a class room with a teacher there to help if needed.
This cake was 12" fruit cake and 10" lemon cake with royal icing and large peony rose spray. The fruit cake was made a number of months before the wedding so that I could feed it, then a month before the wedding I covered it in marzipan and left it for a week or so before covering it in royal icing. I left it for a while just to make sure no oils from the marzipan came through onto the royal icing. To make the royal icing I used the recipe from Mary Berry's cook book with egg whites and icing sugar plus the addition of glycerine so the icing once dry didn't go rock solid. When applying the icing I used a palette knife to get it on the cake and around the edges, smoothed it slightly before using a side scraper that created a curved design.
To make the peony rose I started with three strands of thick wire and pushed them into an inch wide polystyrene ball. I used the ball so it would cut down on the weight, I didn't want the flower falling of the cake due to being heavy in the front. Like a standard rose I started with the small peony petals making sure the polystyrene was completely hidden. Then I built up the central part of the flower bud till there was an adequate amount of petal foliage. I left the middle section to dry for a day or two before dusting with light pink, yellow and a bit of red. For the outside petals they were placed on separate wires so that it gave the flower some movement. For these petals I used the two larger peony cutters and a thinner gauged wire. Once dried and before attaching to the middle section each petal was dusted, wires taped and then I began assembling, working from the medium petals up to the largest petals and securing with green florist tape. Then that's the peony rose complete.
The week before the wedding I baked the lemon cakes filled with a lemon butter cream, dirty iced then covered in white fondant. I let that dry out over night before covering in the royal icing and finishing of with the curved side scraper. I covered the lemon cake in fondant instead of marzipan as the couple didn't want it on the sponge cake so I needed to have a base for the royal icing to go on to, to stop any of the oil from the cake seeping out on to the royal icing. I finished of both layers with beading work.
Once all the royal icing was dry I pushed a flower pick in between the fruit and lemon layers so the flower could sit on the side of the cake.
