I’m back!!!! I didn’t exactly intend to take a roughly three month break from this blog and also social media in general but life caught up with me and I had to take a step back to tend to some of the less sweet things in life. I abandoned my big holiday baking project to care for my sweet Penny dog and we said goodbye to each other right before Christmas.

So although the break happened for not so great reasons, now, in retrospect, I’m actually glad I had some time off. I’ve been writing this blog now for almost two years and trying to post weekly for a lot of that time. Creatively and otherwise, it was exhausting.

It’s also given me some time to reflect on what I want this space to be in 2020 and beyond. The most rewarding things for me to make, write about, and share are what I’ve come to think of as “project baking.” Things like my Fabergé Sugar Cookies , Retro “Hallo Witch Cake” , and the Rosehill Gingerbread Cottage are all projects I’m particularly fond of. They also happen to require a lot of preparation, researching sources and gathering materials (not to mention the actual time to make). Going forward I’m going to take my time and do more of these projects that I love even if it means less frequent posting on here. Quality over quantity… you get the picture.

This cake was inspired by an image of a vintage Wilton wedding cake with roses sort of crawling up the sides. I thought it looked very “trellis-y” which gave me the idea to practice a technique I have been wanting to try for ages. To be completely honest, I don’t even know if the technique has a proper name. I’m calling it a royal icing “cage” because it sounds cool.

Basically you make a pretty stiff royal icing and pipe it over a lightly greased, Styrofoam hemisphere which you can find at any craft store. It requires a steady hand so definitely don’t have a giant cup of coffee right before you pipe. It dries overnight and then you can very carefully pry it off the next day (to do this I very gently ran a post-it note around the edge right at the bottom until it lifted off the form). These are incredibly fragile so it’s also a good idea to make a backup or two. Was it tedious? Yes. Did it give me arthritis? Probably. But, man, was it thrilling.

After that it was just fairly normal cake making from there. This cake is a lemon-scented white cake with a little raspberry filling that I made by adding some jam to the same pink Swiss Meringue I used to cover the cake. I piped a couple different styles of roses and then some different borders around the rest of the cake.

**places the cage over the rose without breathing whilst shaking like a leaf**

For Penny