Happy new year & welcome to our first buttercream cake tutorial of 2017! The theme this time is an elegant Hellebore & Winterberry Holly buttercream flower wreath cake, complete with blossoms and berries that can be found blooming during this winter season. Paired with a nature inspired colour palette, this cake is more grown up and stylish than many of the bright, fun colours we might normally associate with buttercream flower cakes. You can relax and watch a full video of the process, and all the other details you’ll need are in the blog post below. Enjoy!
Buttercream recipe:
If you’re a home baker or hobbyist, you can use my super easy & delicious Simple Buttercream recipe below. Serious foodies or pro’s should use my original SEBC buttercream recipe, beneath the simple version.
Sawsen’s Simple Buttercream recipe – smooth, easy, delicious & less sweet!
Piping tips:
- Wilton 123 for hellebore petals
- Wilton 4 or piping cones for branches
- Wilton 347 speciality tip for flower centre
- DIY piping cones or Wilton 1 for Winterberry holly, stamens and stamen heads
Colourings:
Watch my DIY food colours video for more details.
- Pale green: spirulina & matcha powder
- Brown: melted cooled chocolate
- Yellow: a little turmeric powder
- Orange & red: gel colours
If you want to see which colours and other tools I recommend to get the right results, please visit my recommended products list:
Instructions:
- Bake and ice a cake using a recipe of your choice. If you don’t know how to ice cakes or need a recipe, follow the links below.
Secrets for a perfectly smooth buttercream finish on your cake
. - Prepare a batch of my buttercream, links above, and colour using natural or gel colours. For pale colours you can use the powders dry, just make sure they are crushed/ sifted free of any lumps first. Otherwise, you can mix powders with a tiny bit of warm water until you get a thick paste before use.
- Divide the buttercream into piping bags fitted with the appropriate tips.
- Pipe flowers onto parchment paper and freeze solid.
- Pipe a circular wreath of buttercream branches onto the cake as shown
- Decorate by adding frozen flowers, largest first. Note: this seems like a lot of buttercream, but it is still less on each slice than you would get on a cupcake with a tall swirl on top. Once the cake is cut into slices this becomes obvious.
- Accentuate and fill space by piping berries as shown in the video.
That should be all you need to know to make your hellebore & winterberry holly buttercream flower wreath cake 🙂 Thank you for watching, subscribe & stay tuned for more tutorials to come!
*please note I get a little ad revenue if you click on any of the pictures of amazon products above, so if you’re going to buy anything I’d really appreciate you supporting my channel at the same time by using these links. It doesn’t cost you any extra (Amazon pays me a commission which they don’t charge you anything extra for), and I only link to products I’ve used or close equivalents, and would recommend. Thank you.
Thank you for your tutorial. It looks like the tip used to create the center of the hellebore is different from the Wilton number 1 tip – it looks like 3 strands are produced at once. Is this correct and if so what tip did you use? Thank you in advance for your help.
Hi June, yes sorry I forgot to write that in the post. It’s a #347 speciality piping tip ?