Fondant Rose Ruffle Cake

Have you tried making a Fondant Rose Ruffle cake yet? Ruffles look absolutely gorgeous on a cake, but they do take forever to finish. The plus about ruffles is that no matter how badly you think you made your ruffles they do end up look absolutely gorgeous.  That’s just the nature of ruffle I think.

This is My Signature Chocolate Creme Cake with Vanilla Butter cream and of course home made Fondant.

Here’s the close up of the Ruffles on the bottom tier I’m going to share progress pictures for.

Now I’ve already shared with you how to make ruffles on my video Ruffle Wedding Cake  

Here the only difference is that you place it a bit different on the cake. Instead of placing it around horizontally or vertically on the tier, you place it in a spiral.

The outcome of this will depend on how experienced you are with ruffles. For those who’ve worked with ruffle before it’s easier to handle, for an inexperienced hand it might be a trial and error.
Having said that I do encourage you to try. It’s a lot easier than it looks.
The difficult part is that it involved lots and lots of ruffles. It’s time consuming. So if you choose to do this cake make sure you get a nice hot jug of coffee besides you.

As always start with your fondant covered tiers.
Divide the cake and mark how many and how far you want your roses to be spaced. I have six dots made but I didn’t take a picture.
I used my flexible measure tape – measured the circumference, divided that into six and made dots approximately.  Not complicated right?

Prepare your 50/50 mix
I would recommend to use a 50/50 mix of fondant and gum paste as that would give you a better stretch.
In this case I had to use 100% fondant because the birthday girl was allergic to edible gum. So while I would prefer to roll the fondant really thin in this case I had to roll it a tad thicker.  But as you will see in my daughters cake with similar Rose ruffles I have used a mix of 50 / 50. And the outcome is a lot more elegant. Ruffle look nicer when they are thin.

Roll your strips about 1/4 inch wide.

Ruffle the edges with the ball tool on the foam pad. Run the ball tool half on the pad and half on the edge in a firm and swift motion and you will have not wrinkles but a nice ruffle.

Now start placing your ruffle. 
Brush the cake surface with some water – Not too much just enough to make it tacky. Too much water will make the ruffle move around and less water will not make them stick firmly. Don’t worry you will get a hang of it as you go.
You can start from the inside out  or from the outside in… I found this method from the middle works more better for me.
You can see I have pinch some pleats along the way. That will come naturally with the spiral motion so don’t fight it. Just pinch the bottom on the cake as you go along.  As you can see the bottom of your ruffle actually sits snug on the cake. Use the small side of your ball tool or the back of your paint brush to help press the ruffles – be gentle and don’t poke holes into the cake.

Make a second ruffle exactly the same as the first and continue with the spiral as you did the first.

Make the center
Now for the center I made the ruffle just the same way as above but I made the spiral in my hand and then stuck it in place on the cake nesting it neatly inside the above ruffles made.

See that?  The first one may be a trial and error to get the size right but then the rest will go quite easily.

Now your Rose center is done . So make the outside petals. I added one more ruffle to this one before I moved on to make the next Rose.

You can make two or even three more until you reach the top edge of your cake.
Doesn’t that look gorgeous?

Now make more ruffles and roses.

You see these gaps? Just fill them with more ruffles. You can continue to make them swirling around the roses or just fill the gaps with neatly tucked ruffles like I am doing here.

Here’s a close up of another center.

And here’s the close up of the bottom tier again.

I topped this cake with a Ballerina figure..

And finally the finished cake.

I do hope you find this tutorial useful.