90th Birthday - ombre

JUNE 2014

This is the second of the 90th birthday cakes for Nana.

I really wanted to attempt something classic and so the idea of ombre came to mind.  There are a lot of ways to achieve this look but I liked the circles.  The colour was always going to be blue as it's Nana's favourite colour.

I began with a different brand of fondant - Fondtastic.   It was closer to the shade of blue I wanted so I thought I'd give it a try.  This one was blueberry flavoured.  I would have preferred vanilla but they didn't have any.  The blueberry smell was a bit overpowering while I was working with it and because I added white vanilla fondant to make the lighter blues, it didn't taste blueberry either.

Anyway, I set about cutting out a heap of circles.  I started with the standard fondant colour as my darkest shade and then added some white, etc etc.  I know I made too many circles, but I didn't want to run out as I might not have been able to match the colour.

I wasn't sure how to cover the base of the cake so I tried putting 1/2 circles on an angle and they actually had a great frill effect.  I used the next shade of blue for the lower 1 1/2 levels and then another 3 lighter shades of blue.  I was really happy with the effect.  I just didn't want it to look like fish scales.

I made bow pieces out of the darkest blue colour to add on top of the cake.  I bought diamente numbers to stick in the centre and added some curls too.

THEN I forgot to take a photo of the finished product!   So, this is the best I have of the bow.

 I initially thought I was going to have 'Happy Birthday' around the base but the cake didn't need it.

 The candles I bought were Wilton.  The were supposed to have blue flames which sounded quite cool, but they really only started out blue and then flickered between orange and blue.  I purchased them and the numbers from Creative Cooks.