Flower Basket Cake

If I do say so myself, my mom's birthday cake from last year is the most beautiful cake that I have ever made. It involved a new technique for me (at the time) of making icing look like basketweave. I bought a special decorator tip, and this really was the first time that I had tried it out. The main photo at the top gives you a close up view of the effect. Here I am concentrating hard on my basketweaving.

Since you can't have a basket cake without something in the basket, I chose to do roses. Creating a rose out of icing is tricky, and I still haven't mastered it, but I think the roses for this cake looked really good. I make them on little squares of wax paper and then put them in the freezer until they get hard enough to touch. I made a bunch for this cake and then picked out the best looking ones and placed them around the edge of the cake.

The writing, as always, is a tiny bit off center and crooked, but otherwise looked pretty good. If you can't tell I'm pretty darn proud of this cake.

The only problem with making such an awesome cake is that it's going to be tough to top this year. I have less than a month to plan and I have got a few ideas dancing around in my head. We'll just have to wait and see!