The Rose Parade

I woke up this morning, feeling very productive. I was going to make the fondant roses for my final cake class on Wednesday, make a candy margarita glass from royal icing for another cake I'm making this later this week, go grocery shopping for ingredients for my two cakes, make and ice some sugar cookies as samples, maybe hang all the "f"s in my scraproom... Yup, plenty to do today!

I started off by making the bed. Flylady says to make your bed every day, first thing, even before you head off to pee, so I did.

Gidget, however, disagrees with this philosophy, so she went in there and messed it all up and had a nap to celebrate.

I went into the kitchen, and realized that I really need to find a good way to store my cake stuff, as dumping it all on the kitchen table just isn't working.

Since the table was full of stuff, and I know that our dining room is the hottest spot in this entire apartment, I went ahead and set up shop on the coffee table. This way, I could watch TV while I worked. I had to make fifty fondant roses, and they had to be done a few days in advance so they could dry completely before putting them on the cake. First, I made the bases:

Then the roses got their first layer of petals:

I left 15 of them that way, so they'd be rosebuds instead of full roses. On the rest, I added a second layer of petals"

After this, I was supposed to add a third layer of petals, but to be completely honest, I ran out of the blue tinted fondant. I knew there was no way in hell that I was going to be able to match the exact shade of blue again, so small/medium sized roses they will be!

Finally, I added the calyx to the bottoms of all the roses as a finishing touch:

To make 50 fondant roses, with cutting out the fourth (out of five) step, total time: NINE FREAKING HOURS!!! Okay, I took 30 minutes to eat some dinner, but dang!!! Seriously folks, if you go to buy a fancy cake, please don't balk at whatever the decorator charges. This much prettiness takes time. Holy crap. I'll tell you what, this is the first and LAST cake with this many flipping roses that I'll be making any time soon, if ever!

It's a good thing I decided to start these before anything else, because otherwise I'd have been up all night working on them. Unfortunately, that means nothing else on my list got accomplished, (well, my husband did run to the store for me, so I don't have to worry about that at least!) but this was really the biggest thing.

I was supposed to go to a crop tomorrow, but with two cakes and a birthday party to attend before Wednesday, there was just no way, so I had to cancel. Maybe next month.