Parents time to shine

Wow, where has the past two weeks gone?! I took my last class almost two weeks ago and even though my last class cake flubbed, I was still determined to make some nice cakes for my mom and dad. My roses for the Hawaiian inspired cake turned out more like carnations than roses due to the wrinkly edges, but I figured out the problem. My icing was way to stiff, which makes it much harder to squeeze evenly out of the bag and thus leading to wrinkling. On Wednesday after my last class (over 1 1/2 weeks ago), I baked two 2-layer cakes and made three batches of frosting. The strawberry cake is for my early Mother's Day cake and the dark chocolate cake is for my Dad's birthday. *smiles* It was much easier coming up with a design for Mom's cake than Dad's.

The Mother's Day cake design consisted of light pink frosted cake with pink shell borders and dark-pink roses. The roses were piped the same night I baked the cakes to allow then time to dry slightly, which leads to easier placement on the cake without ruining the flower petals. I thinned the icing more this time, but still maintained a "stiff" consistency to be sure the petals will not droop. Success!
The Father's Cake design was tough! I know my dad likes Off Track Betting (horse racing on a track) and I really wanted to somehow put a race horse design on it. The ideal way to do a realistic design was to use color-flow, but I didn't learn this technique yet. Color-flow is a special type of icing additive that results in a real smooth patterned area and reflects light. Here is an example of color-flow:
It took some thinking but I decided to frost the cake a "grass" green and somehow pipe a brown horse design. Here's the result:
And my Mom's cake:
I am pretty happy with the results.