bat mitzvah cake with fresh flowers

Not only did I make a bar mitzvah cake earlier this year, I was asked to make a bat mitzvah cake as well! The bat mitzvah girl knew exactly what she wanted: she asked if I could make it look like a wedding cake. White, decorated with flowers to complement the pink party decorations. The vanilla frosting, however, concealed a rich chocolate cake filled with both frosting and raspberry jam. Yum.

First of all, how gorgeous are these flowers?

My friend, Jasmine, is a decorator extraordinaire. She sets the most beautiful tables, makes parties look so festive, and she arranges flowers gorgeously. She selected and purchased them from the flower mart in downtown LA and got extras for me to use on the cake. It's hard to go wrong when you are working with such delicate and beautiful stems.

I wanted the cake to be sweet and girly and rustic-looking and to let the flowers be the centerpiece. The family was hosting a lunch and then a small party with the bat mitzvah girl's besties that night, so they planned to save the top tier for the girls and eat the larger cake with the family in the afternoon. I made sure both tiers were nice and tall - that way, you can cut small slices and everyone still has a good-sized piece of cake.

Because I didn't want to poison anyone by sticking the stems directly into the cake, I used these great plastic flower spikes for each individual flower. I cut the stems down to a couple of inches, wrapped them in a tiny bit of wet paper towel to keep fresh, shoved each wrapped stem into a flower spike, and pushed the spikes into the cake. I have also done this before with regular width or boba tea straws (helpful for flowers with particularly fat stems). You really don't want anything inedible to come into contact with the cake people will be eating. You just need to angle each spike to fit so they don't bump into each other inside the cake - or, worse yet, pop out through the side! I sort of nestled the little decorative white flowers and leaves behind and between the flowers without actually needing to insert them into the cake, and they stayed put just fine.

Cakes with fresh flowers are best assembled the day of the event and kept chilled. I decorated the cake the night before, but then I got up early on the morning of to put the flowers on. They were able to store the cake in the fridge until everyone got home from temple, which worked out perfectly!

I took pictures of the cake at nearly every angle partly because it was pretty and partly so I could remember how I arranged the flowers. I'll admit I didn't go in with much of a plan - I knew what flowers I had to work with, and I wanted the clusters to be balanced both in terms of color and amount, so I just winged it!

Mazel tov to the bat mitzvah girl and her family!