How To Make A Rosette Cake -Easy Beginner Tutorial

I have to preface this by saying, I love to bake. I find myself baking at least once a day without meaning too. Maybe because I'm bored. Maybe because I'm hungry. I often find that there is a fine..if no line at all between boredom and hunger :) One thing I don't make often are cakes. Only if it's a birthday. And even then, I just use the box cake mix, put a tub of frosting on it and call it good. I think I might have once made some fondant, and used that. But it took so long to make that I didn't ever do it again. ...back to my prefacing....So, I love to bake. But I do not decorate cakes. In fact, this is truly the first time I have ever made something like this. Well, I made it twice in a week, so I guess it has been twice now. So, I am a beginner at this and got amazing results :)

The babe's birthday was a few weeks ago and I wanted to have a cute little cake for her 'smash the cake' photo shoot. So, I went to order one, and found out how really expensive a simple rosette cake can cost. $40 for a single layered, 6" diameter cake. That's small folks. And that was just for the cake with boring frosting, I never did go back to see what the quote was for the rosettes on it. I couldn't imagine. Plus, I wanted two. So, over $100 for some cakes...no thank you.

I decided that it couldn't be that hard to make on my own. My husband laughed at me :) So, of course I had to prove him wrong, so I went and bought my supplies.
1M frosting tip
Frosting bags
Boxed cake (yep, sure did. made this easy :))
Buttercream Frosting ingredients (from this recipe...you can use tub frosting too, works great). I had to double this recipe to make sure it covered this cake. This is an 8" single layered cake.

Word of caution...I read from a lot of sources that you can use Ziploc baggies instead of frosting bags. DON'T. This doesn't work well, at all. Save your sanity and purchase the $2 frosting bags. I just used the disposable ones. I think I got 12 of them for under two bucks. Not much of an investment. Maybe my Ziploc bags were cheap, I don't know. It may work for some, but did not work for me.

Also, save your sanity and just buy two tubs of icing if you want to make this the quick way :) I used the tubs of icing on my cupcakes and they turned out beautiful :) If you do the buttercream icing, make sure that it is not too dry. I made that mistake on my first cake, the frosting was a little dry and it was a little harder to get the rosettes out and looking beautiful. You'll be able to tell a little in the upcoming pictures.

Okay. So step 1. Cut the corner off of your frosting bag. Put the tip in the bag and through the hole. I had it go out just far enough so the tip edges were out of the bag. The rest of the tip was still in the bag.

Step 2. Get your frosting and fill up the bag. Be weary of air pockets; although I realized this caused a disrupt in flow, it really didn't do much to the over design if you just kept on going.

Step 3. Crumb coat your cake. Don't judge mine, I wanted to use the rest of what was left of the tub frosting. I melted it on and rubbed it around. Much easier than trying to use an offset spatula to crumb coat it with the buttercream frosting. (obviously I did this before adding the rosettes :)...even though the picture shows the rosettes already)

Step 4. Find a place to start. I decided to start by the edge of the cake. Place the tip on the cake, squeeze gently, and then do a little spiral 3 or 4 times around. Easy.

There's your rosette! Now I continued the first rosettes around the cake along the edge.

For the next layer, I found the middle part between two of the rosettes and made another one. I did this around the top and bottom layer of the first layer. Make sense?

As for the holes between the rosettes if you get any big ones, just place a rosette on top it, or squirt some frosting in it if it is small enough.

If you have a hole on the bottom that won't fit a rosette, just squirt a little frosting in there too. You can see that in the below picture, there's just random frosting squirted :) but in the overall scheme of things, you don't really notice.

When you are done with all the layers and filling all the holes, you are done!

See. Easy. And beautiful.

This saved me soooo much money! I was able to make one for the babes cake smashing session and one for her birthday party.

When everyone showed up to the birthday party, they were amazed by the cake and even more amazed that I made it. No better feeling :)

Here's a picture of the frosting from the tub, using the same technique, on the cupcakes:

I wish I would have just used the tub frosting on the whole cake. This would be so much easier, and probably a little cheaper...and quicker :) ....notes for next time...yes, I know...they are full of preservatives yadda yadda yadda ... :) This buttercream frosting actually tasted really good though!

Also, in case you are in the Utah area next weekend, I'll be hosting a Pinterest Party with Hometalk and Michaels at the Draper Michaels location at 1:00pm! Come one, come all :) I would love to meet you guys! It'll just be a fun time of crafting and goofing off. I'll have more details coming up next week!

 

If you are interested in joining but not in my area, you can find more parties here.