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Updated on December 2, 2021 by · This post may contain affiliate links ·

Winter Wonderland Wedding Cake Tutorial

Skill level: Intermediate

Happy New Year! Guest instructor Ashley Barbey is back with another amazing cake project, featuring a winter theme! You'll love the amazing details and process Ashley demonstrates teaching how to make a winter-themed floral arrangement, complete with rose hip fruits, amaryllis, fern leaves and pine cones.

Ashley breaks down every step of this process including how to secure the floral arrangement to the cake, tips for travel and delivery, how to deal with flower breakage, time-saving tricks for making the flowers and filler elements, how to create the beautiful tree bark texture and more.

2:34:18 Minutes of Instruction

What You Will Learn

  • Learn how to create amaryllis, fern leaves and rose hip fruits
  • How to create a beautiful twig wreath
  • Learn how to create a realistic tree bark texture
  • How to secure a flower arrangement to a cake
  • Learn Ashley Barbey's way of delivering an assembled arrangement with minimal breakage

Tutorial Chapters

  1. Why sketching is important 0:41
  2. Making 2nd set of fern leaves 8:55
  3. Making last set of fern leaves 11:09
  4. How to articulate fern leaves 16:40
  5. Dusting the fern leaves 17:01
  6. Assembling the fern 20:51
  7. Adjusting fern & final dusting 25:36
  8. Making filler leaves 28:43
  9. Making larger leaves 31:17
  10. Dusting filler leaves 32:20
  11. Removing excess dust 34:48
  12. Making large rose hip stamens 42:20
  13. Making small rose hip stamens 45:58
  14. Making a large calyx 48:29
  15. Adding fruit to large calyx 52:39
  16. Making a small calyx 54:36
  17. Adding fruit to small calyx 56:05
  18. Dusting the rose hips 57:34
  19. Dusting the calyx 58:47
  20. Making the pine cones 1:02:17
  21. Dusting the pine cones 1:08:56
  22. Making the amaryllis stamens 1:12:09
  23. Making the amaryllis pistol 1:16:39
  24. Making the amaryllis petals 1:19:44
  25. Making the small amaryllis 1:28:11
  26. Dusting amaryllis petals 1:31:02
  27. A note on assembling stamens 1:33:03
  28. Assembling large amaryllis 1:33:31
  29. Assembling small amaryllis 1:36:11
  30. Wreath explanation 1:38:31
  31. Making the wreath 1:39:13
  32. Making wreath twigs 1:43:39
  33. Assembling wreath 1:46:41
  34. Assembling leaves & rose hips 1:50:02
  35. Adding elements to wreath 1:50:57
  36. Covering cake in fondant 1:54:54
  37. Adding detail to cake top 1:56:21
  38. Adding color to details 1:58:29
  39. Paneling the cake 2:02:38
  40. Blending bark seams 2:06:43
  41. Cleaning up the top edge 2:08:56
  42. Painting whitewash 2:10:50
  43. Why you should steam flowers 2:14:36
  44. Which straw should I use 2:16:03
  45. Making the arrangement 2:19:30
  46. Broken leaf touchup 2:30:18

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About Liz Marek

Liz Marek is a professional cake artist and recipe developer who has been teaching baking and cake decorating since 2008. She founded Artisan Cake Company in Portland, Oregon in 2009 and now runs Sugar Geek Show, where she publishes kitchen-tested recipes, food science explanations, and step-by-step tutorials.

Liz is best known for sculpted and hyperrealistic cakes. She won Netflix's Is It Cake? Holiday 2 in 2025 with a hyperrealistic Santa cake, and has competed on and won Food Network cake competitions. Cake Masters Magazine named her one of the top 10 cake artists in 2017. She is the author of Artisan Cake Company's Visual Guide to Cake Decorating and a graduate of the Oregon Culinary Institute.

Her focus is on explaining not just how a recipe works but why it works, so bakers can troubleshoot instead of guess. Every recipe on this site is tested before it's published.

Liz teaches full-length cake tutorials, including sculpted and hyperrealistic cakes, at Sugar Geek University.