When you get interested in making flowers and decorative sugar doodahs for cakes you soon realise the shortcomings of plain fondant. You can add some oomph to it by mixing in some Tylose powder but for real, magical modelling properties, you need gumpaste. *Sigh*
Sweetpeas are made of this, who am I to disagree?
Gumpaste lends magic to your crafting skills and transforms difficult fondant to fine porcelain masterpieces… with some practice and a bit of help!
What help? As ever, YouTube has a tutorial for everything! I’ve compiled a list of my favourites.
If you’re making flowers for a cake, some of these tutorials are bound to inspire so give them a go.
Gumpaste is perfect for making flowers and leaves. It has the strength and elasticity to lets you ruffle, smooth and stretch it to make petals and flowers with a realistic look.
I am totally in awe of the talents of Nicholas Lodge; check out one of his YouTube tutorials and you’ll see what I mean. Another one I love to watch is Renee Connor.
I’m still at beginner level but still proud of the results. Not too shabby.
Sweet Peas made following a Renee Connor YouTube tutorialSweet Peas come in all sorts of shades. These were left white with a light brushing of petal dust on the edges and a soft dusting of foliage green at the base of each flower.Plain white ones
The floristry tape got a bit manky here! Still, am getting there and learning more as I go along.
Lily of the Valley
These little flowers are little more than a ball of gumpaste with a small flower shape (don’t know what they’re called but they’re on Amazon. Simply roll a small ball of gumpaste, dip a floristry wire into egg white (you can get powdered, pasteurised eggwhite on Amazon) or edible glue.
Roll out the gumpaste, cut a flower with the plunger tool, dab a tiny spot of edible glue or egg white onto the ball and press the flower out.
My next projects are peonies – there are huge numbers of YT tutorials to choose from. And Renee Connor’s Poppies. I adore her poppies.
I have the stamens already and found that a set of hemostats I bought for making Tilda dolls come in very handy for placing tiny elements onto cakes and for forming the ridges of a poppy seed head.
No More Mondays 