Succulent Garden Cake

I have nothing but respect (and a whole lot of envy!) for those bakers that pipe beautiful buttercream flowers. In mom’s heyday buttercream flowers were all the rage and she taught me how to pipe roses, leaves, dahlias..you name it. Then some time around the oughts fresh flowers on cakes became the new must-have and buttercream flowers were seen as “outdated.” And that’s where I’ve been, mainly using fresh flowers and succulents on my cakes, with the occasional hand-made paper flowers here and there.

Things are changing once again! In the past few years intricate designs have been blowing up my IG page and I have serious pipping-envy. It seems like the folks in the Indochina region are churning out more and more life-like designs on the daily and I’d give anything to take a class with some of them.

So in honor of some of my favorite designs I decided to try my hand at the very popular succulent cake.

While it’s very apparent that my pipping skills are pretty rusty, this Hazelnut Chocolate cake was still fun nonetheless. I love the look of the ‘clay pot’ and the falling ‘String of Pearls’ - those are my favorite to plant in my pots at home. Fun fact: the flowers that bloom on them smell like cinnamon.

It almost hurt to slice into this after the hours of work put in, but then I remembered there was moist, dark chocolate cake filled with cream cheese frosting waiting inside and I quickly got over the pain….