Wedding cake flower spray - 8/9/11

So, in my previous post, I described the individual flowers I put in my wedding cake spray.
Before I'd started making them, I'd done some sketches to work out what I needed and how big the flowers should be.
So once I'd made up the stems of flowers, I had to make a cake-shaped box to help me arrange the spray properly. This was made up of various boxes and a block of oasis to stick the flower pick into (I'd got two big posy picks as well as some smaller picks, so that I could have a set for the cake and a set to transport the flowers with).

Then to arrange the flowers. I had two single calla lilies, two stems of lisianthus with leaves, two stems of freesias and five stems of spray carnations with rose leaves.

In the end, I only needed three stems of carnations so the other two went on top of the cake, the spray going from the bottom layer up the sides.
The final spray looked like this:

Yes, that is an icing sugar box posing as a cake!

And here is a photo my friend took of the cake all assembled and ready for eating:

Tasty tasty cake!

You can probably see that the main posy is actually in three separate picks because the lisianthus stems were too big to fit in with the rest of the flowers. What you can't see is where the icing cracked on one side because the picks were too close to the edge of the cake...

This cake is two layers of fruit and one layer of madeira, each layer is on a thick board (the middle madeira layer is actually on two boards as it was shorter than the fruit cakes!), with ribbon around the edge of each cake & board. The lower cakes have dowels in to support the upper layers. The top layer has pink hearts inlaid into the sugarpaste as well as the flowers.

Wedding cake flowers - 29/8/11 to 5/9/11

Calla, showing the curve of the petal

In between baking the fruit and madeira cakes, I've been making sugar flowers. There are two lots.
First the favours which will be callas made out of sugarpaste, as in this post, but everyone is getting one each in the end as three hundred sugar callas is too many for me to make. I've done the sticks and the stamens for these (and I still haven't done a tutorial. Whoops.)
Then I decided what flowers I was going to put in the spray to go on the cake. These are made out of flower paste, which is less brittle than sugar paste (but also less tasty!). I decided on freesias, lisianthus, carnations, calla lilies and rose leaves as these will all be in the actual flowers as well.
I've been making these flowers for the past week, working for a few hours each day, and I finished making the individual flowers today. Then I need to make them up into stems, and then assemble the stems into a spray.

Individual freesia buds & flowers taped together into a spray

The tutorial I made for freesias is here, though I do now have a freesia cutter with three separate petals, and it's easier & quicker than the method I used in the tutorial. I did the biggest freesias using the original method as I needed bigger petals than the freesia cutter made.

The carnation tutorial I made is here, but instead of just folding a stamen I wrapped florists tape round a hooked wire to have a firmer base to start from. As I am making carnations which are white with pink tips, I also painted the edges of the petals with pink food colouring using a fine (no.1) paintbrush once the flowers had dried.

The callas I made on wires rather than wooden sticks so that I could shape the wires in the spray. I used three gauge 18 wires, taped together with flower tape all down the length. This also made the wires green as my gauge 18 wires are white! I found that the inside of a kitchen roll is good to rest them on while they dry, as they curve properly at the back of the flower. A large rolling pin would be equally good.

Spray of lisianthus with heart-shaped leaves

As for the lisianthus (latin name is Eustoma), which look like this in real life, I found a rather complicated tutorial here, which I followed to make the stamens etc and then simplified. Instead of wiring each petal separately, I used a gauge 18 wire for the stem and then made the flower in a similar method to the first flowers I made (remember these?), wrapping the petals around the stem before glueing the final one. This worked for some of them, but for others I hadn't made a big enough lump for the ovary so i had to add extra sugarpaste to attach the petals to. This is working so far. The lisianthus are white with purple edging, so I painted the edges of each petal with purple food colouring once the flowers had dried. This helps to highlight each separate petal, though it takes a while as you have to keep it neat!


As a guide, this is what I have made and how long roughly each bit took:

Spray carnations with rose leaves

Freesias - 2 stems, on each stem 1 small bud, 2 bigger buds, 1 nearly open bud, 2 open flowers, 1 bigger flower. Altogether these took me about 4 hours over two days.
Leaves - 18 rose leaves (some big, some small), 16 heart-shaped lisianthus leaves. These took two or three hours.
Carnations - 10 individual flowers (to be made into 5 stems with two flowers on each). These took about two hours to make, and another two hours to paint the edges of the petals.
Callas - 2 individual calla lilies, these didn't take very long at all but I had to let the stamens dry overnight so probably two half-hour slots would make these.
Lisianthus - these took the longest, as I hadn't made these before. Making the stamens was quite fiddly (though it could probably be simplified to make it slightly less botanically accurate). I think these took at least 4 hours, with another hour to paint the edges of the petals.

Now I've updated with pictures of the flowers, you can have more of an idea of what I've done.

Wedding favour - 16/6/11

I decided to see if I could make some wedding favours which were sugar flowers, to show off my flower-making and also because I don't like sugared almonds, the traditional favour.
As the main flower at the wedding will be calla lilies, I made some and then tried to arrange them in a pretty way. They are doubling up as place names.

I was originally going to do just one flower each, but that didn't look very good so I made a little bunch of three. This does mean I'm going to have to make three times as many flowers, but never mind.
The stem is made out of half a wooden kebab stick painted with green food colouring. I made the flowers out of white paste and then painted them afterwards, but colouring first would probably give a better colour.
They are similar to the calla lilies I made before, but I bought a proper cutter so that I don't have to make the shape each time. The stamens are about an inch long and the petal is about 2 1/2 inches long by 1 1/2 inches wide. If you didn't want to buy a special cutter, you could use a similar sized leaf cutter and cut the stem end off.
I'll take photos when I make the next batch and do a tutorial.
(Cross-posted to Marzipan's Crafts)

Cake iced with home made icing - 3/6/11

So, after I'd made my icing from scratch, I attempted to decorate the cake with it. I had quite a lot of problems rolling out the icing, I'm not sure whether that was because it was different icing, or because I was trying to roll out a bigger piece (this cake is 8 inches square, and before I'd only done 6 inch square cakes). It was also a hot day which i think made the icing stickier.
In the end, with the aid of some margarine on the surface instead of icing sugar, it got rolled out and attached to the cake. I was using some of the flowers I'd made a while ago for decorations, as well as a wide ribbon around the sides.

There are a few crumbs in the icing, as the marzipan was only on the top of the cake not the sides.

It was supposed to be an anniversary cake for our visitors, although their anniversary is actually the 2nd of June not the 3rd. As I ran out of time to make new decorations, it ended up being a bit of a random cake. But it tastes good!

View from the front of the cake

Cake from the back. The ribbon is hiding the messy sides of the cake!

There is still about a quarter of the cake left in my kitchen. It tastes good but is quite crumbly when you cut it.

Sugar Flowers - 31/3/11

As the last cake hasn't been eaten yet, I decided to try out some more sugar flowers. Most of these flowers were made following or adapting instructions from Sugarcraft Flowers by Claire Webb. (Some of the instruction pages can be found on the 'look inside' previews of the book's Amazon page.)

First of all, I tried some 'pulled flowers'. These are made without cutters, and are shaped just using cocktail stick, fingers  and a knife to cut the petals. They are quite small so slightly fiddly to shape but quite simple as filler flowers or to represent small flowers such as violas or primroses.

Three 'pulled flowers' drying on an egg box.
The centres are made of pins which also attach them to the egg box.

A 'pulled' daffodil drying on an upturned egg cup.
I spent too long fiddling with this and the petals went funny.

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This is a small spray carnation. it's quite simple, just three small flower shapes folded and glued to the stamens in the centre.

Carnation drying on a cutter.

Carnation in my hand to show it from a different angle.

Finally, I made a calla lily in the same way as the purple ones I've made previously. This is slightly smaller than the last ones and turned out a bit better:

Calla lily drying in a jug.

I also made some freesias, but they're not joined together so I haven't taken any pictures of those yet.

Icing bigger cake - 5/3/11

I've iced one of the cakes which I baked the other day. Last night I covered it with marzipan.

Six inch square cake covered in marzipan.
This is a smoother base for the icing.

The calla lilies which I made a while ago have been repainted as well.

Before: the colour of the petals is not very bright.

After: Stems painted green, stamens yellow.
Petals gone over with purple to deepen the colour.

This morning I covered the marzipan with white sugarpaste and added other decorations.

Callas are supported by small blobs of sugarpaste. Star is inlaid into the surface.

Back of the cake has two hearts,
the sides have flowers and leaves.

Front of the cake has flower and hearts.
All the small decorations are attached on top of the white not inaid.

This cake is probably a bit too busy, but I was slightly overexcited as I have lots of new cutters and colours to play with!

Calla Lilies - 17/2/11

These are some calla lilies that I made in sugarpaste. I adapted the instructions found here to make them.

The stems are made out of kebab skewers cut in half, but I made the stamens too big at first so a couple of them are out of proportion.

You can see the two on the left where I made the stamens too long. 

A problem I encountered was that the amount of colour needed made the paste very sticky and so I had to roll out the icing a few too many times. This meant that by the end, the colour had been reduce by the amount of icing sugar I was using to stop the icing from sticking to the worktop.

One on its own. They look quite like the real thing.

Two together.

These are still made of sugarpaste, not flower paste which may be why I had problems with the icing. However they look quite effective for a first attempt at this flower.