Cake painting is a trend that doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon! I thought a painted rose cake would be a great addition to my collection of painted cake tutorials.
I’ve done quite a few other painted cakes, so if you’re looking for more inspiration definitely check out these posts too:
Buttercream Palette Knife Painted Cake
How to Paint with Leftover Buttercream
5 Tips for Painting with Buttercream
Prepping your cake for painting
Before painting a cake you’ll need to apply a crumb coat followed by a nice smooth layer of frosting. The frosting doesn’t need to be absolutely perfect, but I do think a nice smooth background contrasts nicely with abstract painting! Don’t worry if there are a few uneven spots in your frosting, you can easily paint over any imperfections.
I also usually like to chill my cakes to get the frosting firm. However, a few people have asked me about working in hot climates and struggling with condensation on their cake. So if you’re working in a hot and humid environment, I would chill the crumb-coated cake, but not the outer layer of frosting. Chilling the cake but not the outer layer of frosting should help avoid condensation in hot environments, however you will need to be extra careful about bumping into the cake.
Mixing Colors
The next step is to get your paint colors mixed up. I always like to use the back of a sheet tray, but you can use any flat surface.
For this cake I used a caramel Swiss meringue buttercream, so it’s got a bit of an ivory hue to it already. This actually worked out since I wanted the colors to be a bit toned down and not too bright.
Swiss Meringue Buttercream Recipe
I mixed a yellow, a pink, a light green, and a dark green. I also mixed a portion of my pink and yellow to get a peachy color. Finally, I left a little bit of white in case I needed it. These colors were just a starting point, as I blended them throughout the painting process.
Basic Painted Flower Structure
Before painting on your cake you can practice on a plate to make sure you like the look of your flowers.
To paint these abstract roses, you’ll be painting concentric rings of overlapping petals. Start by creating the outside of the flower, painting the largest petals first. About five petals is good to start. I started with a pink color and gradually blended the colors as I moved towards the center of the flower.
Once you get towards the center it’s not as easy to paint the petals in a ring, so you can start overlapping them until you like with how it looks.
After you the main flower is done, you can go back in with contrasting colors and add highlights or shadows to give a bit more visual interest.
The beauty of this painting style is that you can develop the look as you go along. The last few flowers on this cake were a lot more blended and textured than the first few, but since they’re all within the same color palette they still looked cohesive.
Using the Palette Knife
Now that you’ve got an idea of the basic flower structure, lets look more closely at using the palette knife. I’m definitely not an expert, but this is how I’ve learned to use it.
First I like to smooth out a little patch of buttercream into an even thickness. Then I scrape the excess buttercream off my palette knife and scrape it sideways along that little patch to pick up a nice even amount of buttercream.
The goal is to pick up a nicely rounded, even blob of buttercream without too much hanging off either side. I find this is a nice shape to pick up and use for petals.
When you go to apply this buttercream, you have to angle the palette knife so that the buttercream builds up along the edge of your petal. Then gently scrape away towards the center of your flower.
You can always go back and add to a petal if you don’t like that shape or size of it, and you can also use the tip of the palette knife to scrape buttercream away or adjust things.
You can also play around with blending colors. On this cake I partially blended pink and yellow to create petals with streaks of color.
Also, if you do accidentally pick up too much buttercream, you can turn your palette knife sideways and scrape along either side to get it to taper off nicely again.
When you get to painting smaller petals, you’ll want to pick up less buttercream on your palette knife. So instead of scraping along the whole blade, just scrape along the last third or last quarter of it. You still want to pick up a decent amount of buttercream, just keep the length shorter. This will really help you get those smaller, shorter petals towards the center of your flower.
The same idea applies if you want to add highlights, just pick up a very small amount of buttercream on the tip of your palette knife. Then instead of pressing the whole thing down, you can gently scrape the tip of the palette knife along the petals where you want to add a bit of contrast.
Don’t forget to have fun with this technique, it’s better to actually aiming for your flowers to be a bit messy than too neat. I think if you try to make them neat and even the imperfections become really obvious, whereas if you keep it really rough and abstract it looks more intentional.
Painting Leaves and Fillers
After your flowers are finished, adding in leaves and fillers really helps complete the look.
For the leaves on this cake I used a similar technique as the petals, but but I dragged the palette knife away from it tip, so that the leaf had a bit of a point to it. I used a lighter green for the leaf, then went back in with just a bit of darker green for an accent.
I also had a lot of white leftover, so I decided to do some little dots all around the cake. For these I just picked up the buttercream on the tip of my palette knife and basically tapped it onto the cake, dragging a tiny little bit but not too much.
Piped Bead Border
Finally, I thought a beaded border would really help polish off the cake, so I used a small round tip to pipe that around the base. To pipe a beaded border, just pipe small dots and drag away from each dot as you release pressure on the piping bag. Make sure each dot overlaps the tail of the previous one, and then work your way all around the cake!
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