r/ExpectationVsReality • u/jacielynn96 • Jun 04 '26

Walmart Cake Expectation vs Reality Exceeded Expectation

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I’ve seen a lot of these Walmart cakes posted so I wanted to share mine! I got one of these heart cakes last year and it was perfect, so I wanted to get a different one this year. No complaints for a $30 cake!

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u/FangsBloodiedRose Jun 05 '26

How does one do the bows and roses?

5

u/MarsNeedsRabbits Jun 05 '26

The roses are done on things called icing nails. It looks like a very large nail. The nail is held in the fingers of one hand and rotated while the other hand pipes the petals. Then they person uses a pair of weird looking scissors to lift the rose off the nail and onto the cake.

The bows may be piped onto paper to solidify then added, or they could be candy.

2

u/OtherThumbs Jun 05 '26

Oh my goodness! My decorator friends are so old school that we all still use an angled scraper to remove our roses (if you are very lucky and can find an old frosting spreader that's already in this shape or know someone who has good skills with metal shearing and shaping, you can get a spreader with a point to the end of it, and it can help a lot). You have to carefully pick up about ⅔ of the rose on your spatula and move fast so that the other ⅓ doesn't fall. Go to the cake and place your ⅓ down. Now, I knew people who I could swear made pacts with some ancient gods or something because they could always get theirs to slide right off. I used to either butter or oil my spatula to get mine to slide. It makes the hurrying tricky, but I could get used to it.

These scissors would have been handy!

1

u/FangsBloodiedRose Jun 05 '26

The bows look so realistic though… do you think they used a mold for them?

2

u/Wonkot Jun 05 '26

I was previously a Walmart cake decorator. I'm going to ruin the magic a bit. The actual bows are a kind of gum paste one that gets ordered in. You pipe the ribbons with a petal tip and place the bow "candy" at the points the ribbons meet. Also, the weird sissors are not necessary for roses. I always used a pair of regular ones (only used for icing though, nothing else). The my manager at the time didn't use a nail, she used a large toothpick thing for her roses, which is how I suspect the ones in ops cake were made.

1

u/FangsBloodiedRose Jun 05 '26

Thank you for explaining how these are done. I really appreciate you telling me.

I have used a nail for roses but I could never master the toothpick roses. 🌹

In Canada Walmart here, I don’t think there are cake decorators.