Sugarcraft Flowers 101: Raindrops On Roses

Part One: Daisies & Primroses is here.

Predictably, I've left it so long between parts One and Two of this tutorial that I've now mostly forgotten everything Alex's Granny told me, but theoretically, here is the second part of my sugarpaste flower guide: Roses and Leaves!

You will need: a small quantity of sugarpaste (I'm reliably informed this is gumpaste in America), icing colours (paste or gel), cornflour for dusting, a few sticks of florists' wire cut into small lengths, a little dish of water, a small rolling pin, cocktail sticks or a little metal rod thing - you can see Alex's Granny's below, but I don't know what it is - and some sort of styrofoam block or similar to stick them in once you've finished. Also, to make leaves, a double-sided veiner; there's one in a picture lower down.

To start with the roses: Alex's Granny keeps a tub of these with her decorating equipment; they're just little lengths of florists' wire with hardened buds of sugarpaste on them. If you're ever using sugarpaste and you've got a bit left over, use the remainder to make some of these and just keep them somewhere separate; they provide the hard base to build your rose around.

To make them you take a little bit of wire - about 6cm? - and hook the end over (below), then you dip that hook in water and just mould a little blob of leftover sugarpaste around it into the little bud shape, pictured.

Here are several hardened bases stuck into the styrofoam block, and you can see I've begun adding petals. For this, you take little blobs of sugarpaste and flatten them out so they're really thin using your mini roller. I always had to do it thinner than I first thought and probably Alex's Granny thought I was slightly retarded, but was too polite and/or British to say anything. Don't be like me.

You can either use a petal cutter now or else hand-shape them into little oval/petal shapes. I can't remember using a cutter for this, but everywhere on the internet seems to assume that you do. Use your thumb and fore-finger to stretch them out so they're really thin at the tips, and to give them a bit of shape. Use the little metal rod thingy or a cocktail stick/the wrong end of a teaspoon would do? to wipe a tiny bit of water around the long edge, and then wrap your first petal around the bud.

The closest to a picture I can get is probably the bud in the top right hand corner of the below picture - it should wrap right around the bud shape at a slight angle to cover the (probably a slightly different colour) base beneath it.

You then repeat this with more petals, but placing the next one - slightly overlapping - at the other side. It should curl around it while it's still so small, as above. And then you just continue to place petals on - use your fingers to pinch the tips together once they're on, so they're shaped more realistically and blossom out a little, and make sure the petals overlap a little bit, but otherwise, you're away!

The above picture I think covers more or less every stage in one swoop XD. I am nothing if not efficient. Don't forget to use water or a dot of egg white to glue, or your rose will start slipping down the wire and go all clumpy at the bottom, and Alex's Granny will wonder what kind of idiot her granddaughter is hanging round with these days.

You can also see if you look carefully that the very edges of some of the outer petals are starting to crack slightly; this is because the sugarpaste is beginning to dry out. It dries insanely fast, especially when it's this thin, so you have to work quickly ^__^. Bear in mind we were doing this over the course of an afternoon.

Voila!

For me?! Oh, you shouldn't have.

For the leaves, you can get any amount of leaf-shaped cutters for whatever you so desire, but we just used a small, simple one - you can see it in the picture below, it's almost petal shaped. Roll your paste out flat, as usual, and cut out a thin leaf shape. You can shape this with your fingers as it is, but Alex's Granny has a double-sided veiner (the weird red thing); if you put your leaf in the centre of that (so it lines up the middle with the centre vein) and press both sides around it, it imprints little leaf veins on both side! Whee, so cute.

You can then just use another little length of florist wire to push into the middle of your leaf - there's a thicker groove along the back - about a third of the way up (you can see below where I've pushed one up too far and it's poking out the back of the leaf a bit). Remember to have dipped the wire in water first, so it sticks. And then just use your fingers to pinch the ends a little and give it a bit of natural shape, so the tip curves a bit.

I've gratuitously sneaked Alex's Granny's hands into the above picture, on the sly. I just can't control myself.

And that's it! Re: other question; these flowers last more or less forever - Alex's Granny showed me these incredibly elaborate displays she'd done for various grandchildren's birthdays and christening cakes -we're talking ten, twenty years for some of these XD. No, I did not try to eat them.

By all means, you can eat twenty year old sugarpaste, but leave me out of it ^__^.

Sugarcraft Flowers 101: Upsadaisy!

This may not be the sort of thing normal eighteen year olds do on an everyday basis, but when I am not busy drinking, raving and ...voting?... I've always wanted to be able to make those fantastically delicate edible flowers you see adorning professional cakes. You know, the really beautiful tiny ones you can't believe are made of sugarpaste or whatever.

My friend Alex knows this (what, I said she was a good friend. She knows this and she hasn't left me in a skip yet) and as it happens her granny happens to have the aforementioned Mad Skillz. So the other week she invited me round to hers for a sugarpaste flower tutorial (while Alex presumeably went off drinking/raving/voting. Actually I suspect she was making icecream, with the odd interval for coming over and laughing at the 'enraptured' expression on my face).

(For future reference, Alex has two grannies. One is ridiculously posh (I have a pretty posh voice, and next to her I feel like a Cockney rascal), and one has Mad Cake Skillz. Obviously, all the following took place with the latter. The former may feature in the future should I ever need to prepare afternoon tea, or perhaps own a mansion).

I don't claim any experience at all at flower-making; I'm genuinely just relaying Alex's granny's wisdom here. Don't laugh at me if you have loads of decorating experience, kids: this is a from-scratch guide, okay?

This post is being split into two, on grounds of being so epic. This week (bear in mind here I'm never going to be organised to make this weekly): daisies and primroses.

These were the first, and simplest things we made. You will need: a small quantity of sugarpaste (I suspect this has a different name in American. Damned if I know what) - I'd only ever used fondant before -, icing colours (paste/gel), cornflour for dusting (Alex's Granny's Handy Hint: better than icing sugar as it doesn't go sticky when you've got water around. The woman's a genius. Don't tell me you all already use cornflour rather than icing sugar or I'll cry), small or medium blossom cutter (for daisies) and a medium primrose cutter (for primroses, obviously), a ball ended modelling tool for daisies and cone ended for primroses, a small rolling pin, a few sticks of florists' wire, and some sort of foam mat. And possibly some stamen-type things.

Sounds rather complicated. It isn't.

The daisies are hugely simple: you basically roll out a small quantity of dyed sugarpaste (far, far thinner than I expected) then use your blossom cutter to cut lots of small/medium flowers out. Roll over them briefly with the rolling pin again, and then you use the end of your ball-ended modelling tool to just press them into the foam - and when they spring up again they've shaped round it into little semi-circles (top right of the above picture). Cute, no? And dead speedy.

You can then use a little more sugarpaste in a darker or contrasting colour and make tiiiny little versions to go inside, like below. Which, let's face it, wins at life. In the ones below little tiny stamens have been threaded through the daisies to pin the two together. Don't eat the stamens, haha, but they're cute.

If you don't want to use stamens, or you're just putting these on top of a cake and not flinging them around anywhere, or else you just have icing on hand, you could use a little blob of royal icing to go inside these instead. Or (Alex's Granny's Handy Hint #2) a dot of egg white will secure the flower to the stamen. Huzzah!

Do I love how easy these are? Yes I do. Am I sort of obsessed with Alex's Granny? Yes I am. She is my new hero.

Primroses are also pretty simple (I'm saving the more tricksy roses for next time XD). For these, you make a little oblong of yellow sugarpaste (or, you know, it doesn't have to be yellow. Primroses are, but don't feel like I'm limiting you as women or anything. Or men. I'm not limiting men either), and then use a tiiny skewer - I didn't put skewers on the list, did I? I'm sure you've got skewers, or something similar) to flatten the bottom as you rotate it round. There's an ACTION SHOT! of Alex's Granny in action just below. Don't you just love her hands?

Then once your primrose is fine enough, you use the cutter to get the basic shape. You can either pinch the bottom or press it into a little hole - below, Alex's Granny is using a mat with little holes like this one. She's also using the ball-ended modelling tool to give the petals a bit of shape; you can roll the end of your skewer in a triangle along each petal, as well.

Below, you can see the shape this has given the petals. You can then use the cone-ended modelling tool to imprint the middle - you see it's like a little star shape? Don't go too deep or you'll puncture it; it needs to be intact cause you're going to push a little length of florists' wire through the middle. Wet the end of the wire first so it doesn't drop out, and you can press a stamen in after that too, if you want.

That is possibly my favourite picture in the world.

And voila! Primroses and daisies galore!

...Oh, you want to know how to make the roses now? Watch this space.

Hope that was okay: this is a bit of a departure from my regular blog posts, and I'll feel an idiot if everyone's like, 'er, everyone knows how to do this,' or 'this is crap, this way is better..'. Like I said, I have zero experience, so I hope that all made sense.

Can we have a moment of collective love for Alex's Granny as well, please? She now thinks I'm a maniac, admittedly, but you know it was worth it.