Purple Orchid Wedding

I hate purple, well at least purple wedding cakes. It's so hard to match, with some purples having lots of blue and some shades having lots of red.  Not to mention the super dark colors like these orchids.  It takes a lot of food coloring!  Also, you have to have a good photographer or all the purple throughout the wedding decor will photograph as black.  Well  that isn't so bad, right? Well after you kill yourself to get the right shade of purple, any UV or natural light fades the colors!  This fading happens fast! We recommend keeping all your purple covered with something light cannot penetrate like foil.  The one thing I have found that helps in painting your items with petal dust.  You can start with dark purple and just paint over it.  We heard about adding some baking soda to the fondant would keep it from fading, but in our experiments it didn't make a difference.  Stupid purple!

There where some interesting colors on this cake, but as usual when we get it to the venue with all the other decorations, cloths and flowers, it was perfect! It is hard to tell, but the top and third tier has sanding sugar all over it.  It's pretty and adds a little texture and crunch to the cake.  The monogram was done with Fondarific.  We used a stencil to trace the letter with a wooden tool and then really "carved" it in and then painted it with petal dust.  The stencil was done with buttercream and on buttercream.

So today's project?  Making dark purple flowers for this weekend's wedding! Argh!