Purple Peonies

This was a purple and yellow themed party for a 2 year old. The mom just wanted flowers on top of the cake and gave me full freedom to do whatever flowers I wanted, they just had to be purple. So at the last minute I decided to make peonies, for a few reasons; I think they're really pretty and I had never made them before. Usually when I am given freedom in the design I always like to try something new.

Unfortunately I could not find peony fondant cutters anywhere! Every single Utah supply store I called either was "out of stock" or had no idea what I was talking about... both of those I found quite odd. First that a cake supply store, that carried flower making supplies would not know what peony cutters were... and that the places that knew what I was talking about were out of stock; I mean, I didn't think that peony fondant cutters would be in such high demand. Who knew.

So I went in search for them on the internet and was able to find plenty there, however due to my unfortunate timing, I would not have gotten them in time. Finally, I found a wilton set on Amazon.  When the set arrives, to my horror, I find that it does NOT in fact have a cutter for a peony. Great, now what? Well, I decided to improvise and ended up using one of the other flower cutters because I really had my heart set on making the peony. Crisis averted. Even though they don't look exactly like peonies I thought they turned out really pretty.

For the rest of the cake I made a very tall 8" round vanilla bean cake tinted purple. I covered the outside with a pale yellow fondant, and purple ribbon. I made the "2" and the name from purple fondant. I really wanted to stick with the purple theme so I also made a really tasty blackberry Swiss butter cream. I pureed a bunch of blackberries in a food processor and to get rid of the seeds I pushed the puree through a sieve, and was left with a thick almost jam-like puree. Then I added that to the butter cream and viola, fresh blackberry butter cream.

I had a little bit of cake batter left so I made 6 cupcakes and stuck a fresh blackberry on top of each.
I also made lemon sugar cookies and frosted them with the remaining blackberry butter cream.
I set the table with a green and white checkerboard table cloth, some different shades of purple and yellow flowers in very cute purple and yellow vases, and a few mason jars!

Blackberry cupcakes with lemon and blackberry cookies.

The inside of the cake. Darker purple bottom with a purple/yellow swirl top. Naturally colored with vegetable food coloring. 

Here is Gracie digging into one of the cupcakes, she loved the frosting!!