Brimming with Roses Birthday Cake

I have been behind on my blogging recently, due to a job change. So this blog is a little late, as I originally made this cake a few weeks ago for my mother-in-law's birthday. But better late than never!! So my husband has mentioned in the past that his mom never baked that much when he was growing up. The only cake her could ever remember her making, was carrot cake from scratch. So for her birthday, we decided I would search for the best home made carrot cake recipe I could find. So I hit the Internet and I probably read about twenty different recipes before I found what I now know to be the best carrot cake recipe ever! I mean it's been about two weeks since I had a slice of this cake, and I can still recall the wonderfully warm taste of cinnamon, nutmeg and black walnuts combining with the tangy, rich cream cheese frosting. Now that I had my cake recipe pinned down, I wanted to come up with a good design for decoration, so I could show off my new decorating skills to the family. So I flipped through a Wilton Cake Decorating book that I had. I didn't really have to flip too far, as the cake I was inspired by was on the cover of the book. Below are the pictures I took as I assembled and decorated the cake, I hope you enjoy!

Here is the cake, the cream cheese icing and the walnuts used for decoration. The recipe I used made enough batter for a 3 layer cake using 8" round pans.

Hmmm, this looks good!

All three layers stacked high!

I put on a pretty thick crumb coat, as I knew that you wouldn't really see much of the icing once the cake was decorated. After crumb coating, I pressed a mixture of regular walnuts and black walnuts to cover the sides of the cake.

See, TaDa!

And here are my beauties. The stars of the show. My royal icing roses.

Since I work full time, and I knew I had to bake my cake on a Friday night, and assemble and decorate on Saturday morning, I spent Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday night making my roses. I worked with one color of icing each night. I just sat in my living room and made roses while I half-watched TV. It was actually quite relaxing.

Once I positioned each of my roses on top of the cake, I piped green royal icing leaves to fill in any gaps.

And here she is, all ready to go and celebrate!

And as I mentioned before, it was DELICIOUS!

Here is a nice shot of the whole cake.

And one more shot from above.

This cake was a lot of work, but totally worth it. It came out beautiful and it really was a (big) slice of heaven, right here on earth!