Lunar Flower Cake

My graduation cake!

Took me about two weeks to put together, not including the month I spent experimenting with and making the flowers.

This is made with cake forms, as per the assignment, with varying shades of blue fondant with nonpareils pressed in (took me a while to figure out how to do that effectively!) and accented with cake sparkles to make nebulae. The clouds are royal icing, and the moon is cake-sparkled fondant strengthened with royal icing and then icing-glued onto an upside-down candle holder. The customizable pillars are a new-ish item from Wilton filled with glass droplets. The flowers are gumpaste and floral wire lightly tinted with chalk dust.

The flowers have an interesting story behind them. Fellow anime geeks who are familiar with Wolf's Rain may recognize these as the legendary Lunar Flowers. Actually, in real life they are the blooms of a night-blooming cactus called the Dutchman's Pipe or Night-Blooming Cereus (scientific name Epiphyllum oxypetalum).

Oddly enough, about a year or two before Wolf's Rain was airing on Adult Swim in the US, my mother acquired a specimen of Dutchman's Pipe from a friend of hers. I was jazzed with myself when I made the connection because no one had figured out what the heck it was at the time. Unfortunately it died a few years back, which is a pity 'cause it had such beautiful blooms.

Anyway, I decided to use these on my cake mostly because I wanted something night-themed and I was curious if such an unusual flower could be done in gumpaste. I figured out a workable technique after a week or two of experimenting, and it turned out pretty well, except for the usual extreme fragility of most gumpaste flowers.

I got a lot of positive comments, both in class and at graduation, but it didn't win any awards. Still, I really like this design, and maybe in a few years when my hand is a bit more practiced I'll try to make it again. The important thing is that, for all it's roughness, it proves how much I've learned about cake decorating in the last year and a half.

Hope you guys like it!