How to Make a Buttercream Flower Cake

Learn how to make a buttercream flower cake that is fun and flirty with just a few piping tips and your favorite frosting! This cake design looks fancy, but even beginner bakers can make it. Piping buttercream stars and rosettes directly onto a frosted cake couldn't be any easier.

Why We Love this Cake

The cake starts with a watercolor finish around the sides. Select a color palette that blends together beautifully. Here, I used different shades of pink, orange, and purple.

This is one of my favorite techniques because not only does each cake have a unique pattern of colors, but also because it is impossible to mess up. The watercolor finish is organic and always looks beautiful.

Follow this Watercolor Cake tutorial to learn how to make a watercolor cake.

I had the opportunity to take over the Wilton Cakes Instagram account to share this cake. Be sure to follow along with us. Keep reading for a more detailed look at the design:

Tips for Piping Buttercream Flowers

• Hold the piping bag with your dominant hand and gently squeeze. Use your other hand to guide the tip and create your flowers.
• If the buttercream becomes soft and the flowers no longer hold their shape, pop the piping bag in the refrigerator for about 5 minutes then try again. The heat of your hand may warm the piping bag over time.
• If the buttercream is too stiff to pipe, try massaging the frosting within the piping bag to soften it up a bit.
• Carefully scrape off any unwanted flowers with an offset spatula. You may also chill the cake first to firm up the buttercream, then remove the flowers.
• Always remember to stop squeezing the piping bag before pulling it up and away from the design.

Buttercream Flower Cake

Using a variety of Wilton piping tips, it’s super easy to create this vibrant buttercream flower pattern. Each tip creates a different shape and adds loads of texture. Let’s take a closer look to see which tip creates which buttercream flower:

How to Pipe a Buttercream Rosette

My favorite piping tip is the Wilton 1M. It makes perfect rosettes. Start by piping out these large rosettes first (the deep pink ones).

To create the rosette, hold the piping bag straight up (perpendicular to the surface of the cake) and hover it above the top of the cake a half-inch or so. Starting from the inside then out, pipe a tight spiral of buttercream.

As you complete the spiral, release the pressure on the piping bag so that the tail tappers around the rosettes. Continue and pipe 3 to 5 rosettes (I find that odd numbers look more organic).

Moving in size order, select the second largest tip. I used tip 1G to create the large purple blossoms. Use them to fill in the gaps around the rosettes and create a crescent shape.

To create these types of flowers, simply hold the piping bag with tip straight up above the surface of the cake, squeeze the piping bag until the buttercream creates a flower, then release the pressure on the piping bag before pulling it up and away.

Be sure to hover the piping bag over the cake so that the buttercream can build. If it is touching the surface of the cake, the buttercream has nowhere to go.

Continue filling in the crescent shape with buttercream flowers using various-sized tips. Use the smallest tips to fill in small gaps and to tapper off the half-moon shape on each end.

The remaining flowers were created with the following piping tips: 2F (orange), 2C (white), and 32 (light pink).

Adding sugar pearls the center of the piped buttercream instantly turns them into flowers, don’t you think? Use smaller sugar pearls to fill in the gaps and scatter around the cake.

A big THANK YOU to Wilton for providing the products used to create this cake design. For more cake decorating ideas, be sure to check out Wilton’s Birthday page!

Thank you for supporting the brands that make Style Sweet happen. All thoughts and options are my own.