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.

Pizza cake - 13/7/11

It's been a while since I last made a cake, so yesterday I got together with my friend and we made a cake to look like a pizza. The idea came from Making Great Cakes, another cake book I seem to have acquired.
The cake itself is a 9" (23cm) round madeira cake, as I need to practice making sponge cakes as well as fruit. So we cut the top off and turned the cake upside down, then added some red buttercream for the tomato sauce:

lots of red food colouring everywhere

 Next was some cheese, this is yellow sugarpaste (fondant icing) grated with a cheese grater:

Then we added some sausage (red marbled with a bit of green, made into a roll and sliced) and some green leaves and green herbs for a garnish:

you could also do the herbs with dessicated coconut, but we didn't have any to hand

The beauty of this is that you could do whatever toppings you liked, as long as you could make them with icing. Also the positioning doesn't have to be perfect because it never is on a real pizza!

Caramel upside down pear cake - 10/6/11

I made one of these a while ago, but it got eaten before I managed to take a picture of it! Quite a few friends asked for the recipe, so here it is. It's from The Really Useful Cookbook, which lives up to its name.

4 large ripe pears (not too ripe or they fall apart)
150g golden caster sugar
125g butter, softened
120g brown sugar
2 eggs
125g self raising flour
pinch of ground ginger
23cm (9 inch) round cake tin


1. Preheat to oven to 180°C (Gas 4). Grease the tin and line the base with baking paper.
2. Peel the pears and cut two of the into quarters and then eighths, giving you 16 slices. Cut the remaining pears into 1cm dice.
3. Place the golden caster sugar and 3 tablespoons of water in a saucepan and bring to the boil over a medium heat, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Boil gently without stirring until it forms a golden caramel. Carefully pur the caramel into the base of the tin, swirling it to cover the paper. Arrange the pear slices on the caramel.
4. Beat the butter and brown sugar together. Whisk the eggs and add to the mixture. Sift in the flour and ginger and fold in to the mixture. Stir in the diced pears.
5. Spoon into the tin and smooth the top. Bake for 45-50 mins. Test with a skewer.
6. Cool in the tin for 5 minutes before turning out onto a serving plate.

I actually used dark brown sugar for the caramel as I didn't have any golden caster sugar. I've used white sugar before, I think the main difference that it makes is how dark the caramel is.
I use a springform cake tin (where the side detaches from the base) as I don't have another 9 inch tin. This makes it easier to get the cake out, but you need to line all of the tin not just the base, or the caramel will leak out!

Marzipan makes marzipan (and icing) - 1/6/11

I've been meaning to make my own marzipan and icing when the blocks I'd bought ran out, so for this cake I found some recipes. So far I've made the marzipan and put that on the cake, with a recipe I found here. It works quite well with my cake recipe, as the cake asked for lemon zest, almonds, and vanilla and almond essence, and the marzipan wants lemon juice, more almonds, and vanilla and almond essence!
One of the best bits about making this marzipan was eating the bits that were left over. I think it's the lemon juice that makes it so nice.
I thought I'd made enough to cover my cake, but I couldn't roll it as thin as I've been rolling the shop marzipan as it fell apart, so I only covered the top of the cake.
Here's my marzipanned cake and the recipe:

You can see where I've used marzipan at the bottom of the cake to fill in the gaps

Ingredients
200g ground almonds
120g caster sugar
120g icing sugar
1 egg yolk
1 whole egg
1 tsp lemon juice
3 drops vanilla essence
2 drops almond essence

1. Sift the caster sugar & icing sugar together. Add the ground almonds and stir well.
2. Beat the eggs and add to the mixture, add the lemon juice, vanilla and almond essences. Mix well.
3. Knead on a board with icing sugar until smooth.

That's it! I thought marzipan was much more complicated than that. Marzipan from the shop is cooked so it doesn't have raw egg in it, or you can get recipes which use liquid glucose or glycerine instead.
The amounts I've given should cover an eight inch square cake, I actually made half that amount as usually I don't use much marzipan.
Now for the sugarpaste (ready to roll/fondant icing).
I used the recipe from Beginner's Guide to Cake Decorating (available on Google Books here.) It's also quite simple. I used the egg white which was left over from making the marzipan, but again, if you don't want to use raw egg you can get dried egg white which you make up with water, or liquid egg white from the chiller section of the supermarket. There are also alternative recipes which use gelatine and glycerine instead of egg white.
The mix is quite crumbly and not sticking together at forst, but enough mixing and/or kneading and it comes out quite smooth. Here's mine wrapped in cling film:

Not a very interesting picture!

Next I'll ice the cake and see how my icing compares to the shop-bought stuff.

Floodwork flowers and leaves, and some cookies - 10/5/11

I've finally got around to doing some more decorations rather than just making tasty cake and eating it!
These are some flower and leaf decorations made by a technique called flooding or runout. Basically you draw some shapes on a piece of paper, cover that with baking or greaseproof paper (somethinig non-stick that you can still see the lines through), draw over the outline with stiff icing, then water it down and colour it to fill in the outlines. Colouring in in icing form, in fact. Sounds simple, but actually more difficult than it sounds if you misread the recipe as i did and put too much liquid into the icing! The end result looks pretty good though:

Flowers and leaves on a sheet of baking paper

The same shapes in different colours

Here's a quick recipe, and some things I would have found useful to know:
Recipe from Beginner's Guide to Cake Decorating.
Ingredients:
1 egg white
250g (9oz) icing sugar, sifted
3 tsp lemon juice (TEASPOONS not tablespoons)
food colourings

Equipment:
template drawn on paper (you can make up your own, or find one somewhere. I drew mine on the computer and printed it out so they were all alike)
baking paper
paper piping bags (if you don't know how to make them, there's a video tutorial here. Don't cut the tips off yet though.)
1mm piping tip
cocktail stick

• Lightly beat the egg with a wooden spoon. GRADUALLY, add the icing sugar and beat until it is a smooth paste. Add 2 tsp lemon juice slowly until the mixture has a stiff piping consistency. Fill a piping bag fitted with a 1mm tip (a couple of teaspoons of icing should be plenty to make as many as I did) and cover the rest of the icing with cling film on its surface so it doesn't dry out.
• Pipe over the outlines and leave them to dry. I taped the paper to the table so it didn't slip about.
• When you have enough outlines, gradually add more lemon juice to the icing until it is easy to spread smoothly. If you want to colour the icing, divide it into smaller bowls or cups and add the colouring, mixing with a teaspoon or cocktail stick. Don't forget to cover the surface of the icing with cling film when you're not using it to keep the air out.
• Fill a paper piping bag with the thinner icing before cutting off the tip, only cutting off a small amount of the tip so that the opening is 2mm or so across (you can always cut off more later if you need to). Gently flood the outlines with the coloured icing. I put a couple of drops of icing in and spread it gradually with a cocktail stick, but this is mainly because my icing was too runny to pipe properly.
• Leave them to dry overnight and remove carefully once completely dry with a palette knife or by peeling the paper backwards from the shapes.
• They should keep for up to a week if stored in an airtight container. I layered them on kitchen paper so that they could be kept safe.

And I used up my egg yolk by making tasty choc chip cookies. The recipe is from Cooking:a Commonsense Guide, but I don't have the metric equivalents as I generally bake in imperial measurements.

 5oz butter
1 1/2 oz brown sugar
3oz caster sugar
1 egg yolk
1 tsp vanilla essence
5oz self raising flour
3oz chocolate chips

Cream together the butter and sugar. Add the egg yolk and vanilla, then the flour. Mix to a dough. Add most of the choc chips. Make into small balls of about a teaspoonful each and place them on a baking sheet with lots of space between them. Push the remaining choc chips into the tops of the cookies. Bake at 180 C for 10-15 minutes.

Step by step: carnation - 1/4/11

Following from my freesia step by step, here's how I made a spray carnation. Again, it's based on the method in Sugarcraft Flowers by Claire Webb.

Carnation

You need:
Sugarpaste (fondant icing) or flower paste
Colouring - the colour you want the flowers to be, and green
Small blossom/flower cutter approx 2cm diameter
Cocktail stick or wooden kebab skewer
Edible glue
Artificial stamens or thin wire approx. 5cm long
Small knife (a craft knife would be good)
Small paintbrush
To attach the flower to a stem you will need:
Thicker wire for the stem
Florists tape or ribbon approx 7mm wide
You may also find pliers useful to bend the thick wire, and tweezers to move the petals into place.

Flower
1. Roll a piece of sugarpaste (either the colour of the flower or white to colour later) and cut out three flower shapes with a cutter. Fold a stamen in half and set aside. Cut slightly down between each petal to divide them more.
2. Using the cocktail stick, roll out one flower shape thinner and frill the edges if you like. Mark a hole in the centre.  Apply edible glue to half of the centre leaving the petals free to be shaped later.
3. Slide the flower onto the stamen and fold in half. apply more glue and fold in half again. You may find tweezers useful to separate the small petals and shape the flower head slightly.
4. Roll out another flower shape as above and mark a hole in the centre. Apply edible glue to the centre for this flower and slide up to attach to the first.
5. Repeat step 4 for the final flower, making sure that the petals go between each other to give the right flower shape. Support it while it dries.

Step 1

Step 2

Step 3

Step 4

Step 5

Assembly
Use the fold in the stamen to thread onto a piece of wire with a hook in the end. Twist this around to secure and wrap florists tape or ribbon around the wire to hold it firm. You could also add a calyx to the bottom of the flower before assembly to make it more realistic, or paint it on. Each flower should be on a separate small stem which combine to make the spray.

Step by step: freesia - 1/4/11

So today I was finishing my freesias, so I've done a little step by step for freesias. Mine aren't perfect yet but I thought I'd try to show how you don't always need to buy expensive cutters etc for each different flower.
This is adapted from the instructions in Sugarcraft Flowers by Claire Webb.

Freesia

You need:
Sugarpaste (fondant icing) or flower paste
Colouring - the colour you want the flowers to be, and green
Small leaf or petal cutter approx 3cm long, 2cm wide
Cocktail stick or wooden kebab skewer
Edible glue
Artificial stamens or thin wire approx. 5cm long
Small knife (a craft knife would be good)
Thicker wire for the stem
Florists tape or ribbon approx 7mm wide
You may also find pliers useful to bend the thick wire, and tweezers to move the petals into place.

Flowers
1. Roll a piece of sugarpaste (either the colour of the flower or white to colour later) and cut out two teardrop shapes with a leaf or petal cutter. Fold two stamens in half and set those aside. It may be easier to handle the flowers later if you add another wire to the folded end of the stamens at this point.
2. Mark on the petal shape to divide it into three smaller petals and cut into the required shape.
3. Using a cocktail stick or a kebab skewer, roll out each small petal more thinly and frill the edges.
4. Spread edible glue a quarter of the way up the petal and wrap the petal around the folded stamens, leaving the fold showing out of the bottom of the petal.
5. Repeat steps 3-4 with the second petal, making sure that the mini petals in the two layers go between each other (so you can see all six.)
6. Use the folded stamens to hang from a wire to dry. be careful handling these flowers as they are quite brittle and delicate.
7. Make as many as you need for one stem of freesia (about 3-4 flowers should be enough). Shape the calyxes from a small cone of green sugarpaste, the broad end hollowed out with a cocktail stick and two cuts in the sides of the cone. Slide these carefully onto the flowers. (Alternatively, you could paint the bottom end of the flowers green with food colouring.)

Step 1

Step 2

Step 3

Step 4

Step 5

Step 6

Step 7

Buds
8. Cut a stamen in half (or cut a piece of wire about 1 inch long). Shape a small pea-sized piece of green paste into a teardrop shape and insert the wire into the thin end of the teardrop. You can fold the wire in half and insert both ends into the paste to make it easier to hang up the bud to dry.
9. Make as many buds as you need (2 or 3 for one stem of freesia) and leave to dry. Attach one bud to a thicker wire by making a hook in the end of the thick wire and hanging the bud at the very end. The other buds can be hung freely on the wire for now.

Step 8

Step 9

Step 10

Step 11

Assembly
10. Try out the spacing of the buds and flowers on your wire, then remove them all except the first bud at the far end.
11. Attach the florist tape or ribbon to the end of the wire and wrap along until you come to the place for the next bud. Slide the bud along the wire and continue wrapping. Add all the buds and flowers in this way. It may be easier if you have someone to help you hold the wire or ribbon to make sure the wrapping is neat and flat. Make sure the wrapping is taut so that the flowers don't shift about too much. You can dot edible glue along the wire to hold the ribbon/flowers in place if you want. When you have attached all the flowers, bend the stem wire at a right angle to imitate a freesia stem. Continue wrapping it or tie off the ribbon.

Next: carnations