Bed of roses

Big bed of roses for a lovely lady who turned '40' recently (*LoL*) .

HAPPY BIRTHDAY AZLEEN...!

It was good fun putting this behemoth of cupcakes together, intended to serve 50, and I realized in retrospect how very fortunate I was - it was only when manoeuvring the cuppies into the small and tight little boxes corners that it occurred to me had the cupcakes been any wider and the petals slighty taller, I would be having a bit of a storage issue on my hands... Phew!

Note to future self: Must measure, must measure... widest, longest, tallest, etc.....!

There were dark moist chocolate and vanila cupcakes frosted with chocolate and vanila buttercream.

The roses are fashioned from very stiff buttercream - tinted a subtly variegated palette of peach, lemon yellow, pink, lilac, etc- piped using a petal tip on a flower nail.

Formed petal by petal, flower by flower, the roses are made ahead of time and allowed to 'dry' thoroughly before being adhered to the surface of the iced cupcakes.

The interstices are filled with clusters of leaves, piped using the white chocolate buttercream tinted with pale kelly green...

Piping the buttercream roses wasn’t too hard but transferring them onto the cuppies was a totally different matter altogether...these were the ones that survived the 'journey' ...

I must have aged ten years just transferring each of the 50 roses.
All in all, it was a really good, fun and very messy experience.

I really look forward to trying my hand at more buttercream roses and playing around with the different types of buttercreams.