You Want Me to Cook?: Advanced Gum Paste Flowers

I finished this class several weeks ago and just realized that I never wrote this post! It’s a shame too because all of my flowers pulled together nicely. The last class is always final project day and I decided to pull together all the flowers I made (including some more I made during the last week) into bouquets.

We still had a couple of things to learn. Here is lesson plan for this course. The red, bold text is what we covered in the final class:

Blossoms
Gerber Daisies
Sweet Peas
Ivy Leaves
Lily Leaves
Briar Rose
Stargazer Lily
Stephanotis
Assemble Blossoms, Leaves and Bouquets
Using Flower Spikes

I was excited to get my Stargazer Lily put together. It is one of the most grown flowers today and if I ever want to take myself seriously decorating cakes, I’m going to need to be able to make this one.

If you remember from Class #2, we made all the petals and leaves separately. We then had to color the leaves and judging from the picture above, I could have made my pink hue a little wider – maybe giving it only 1/4-to-1/2-inch amount of white. Luckily, I threw the color dust into my kit, but unfortunately the brand new edible marker was left on my kitchen counter. One of the lovely women in my class let me borrow hers and I was able to finish decorating.

Putting the leaves together correctly wasn’t hard, but you have to be really patient. That and once you get those little buggers lined up correctly tape them as quickly as possible. The leaves almost lay perpendicular to the flower, and I found it was almost easier to put them on upside down. Once you get it all together, you’re going to end up with this:

I was incredibly excited.

Now, the rest of the class was assembling bouquets and then decorating our cake. I had a bunch of flowers that I had made throughout the class and wanted to use them, but I wasn’t sure how to use all of them. I decided that if I went with cupcakes I could use all of them. And I’d get to use a lot of the floral spikes I bought.

I started with the Stargazer Lily and I quickly realized that my flower spikes were too big for my cupcakes. That’s why there’s a lovely mound of icing up to the flower. Still I think it looked lovely.

The plan was to have one flower per cupcake:

One Stargazer Lily cupcake – done
One Gerbera Daisy cupcake
One Sweet Pea and Stephanotis bouquet cupcake – didn’t have a lot of these & they seemed to go together
One blue Blossom cupcake
One pink Blossom cupcake
One yellow Blossom cupcake

I had spent the day before making 10 of each color blossom and making sure the other flowers were protected. I add on the “protected” part since I had already broken my Briar Rose.

I decided to assemble the Blossom bouquets first and quickly realized that 10 Blossoms don’t make a very big bouquet. So, I decided to put all the Blossoms into one bouquet. Luckily, I had 2 Gerbera Daisies and I stretched out the Sweet Peas and Stephanotis into their own cupcakes.

I think I made it work. I was sufficiently proud of myself until one of my classmates showed me her cake.

Cakes by Dana Hudson
Coming soon to a wedding near you

Oh. My. God. And she’s in high school. People, take note… I think we may have the next cake decorating superstar right here in Northwest Indiana and her name is Dana Hudson.

I feel incredibly inadequate now.

So I’m a little sad that my cake decorating journey is over. What I didn’t realize is that I don’t live very far away from Wilton headquarters where they teach a lot of classes on a lot of different topics. I’m going to take a month but I’ve decided I can’t stay away!

So until then… happy decorating!

You Want Me to Cook?

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Advanced Gum Paste Flowers – Class #4: Final Project

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