Baking Project

I wanted to try using the sunflower plunger I bought recently and thought of just making 3 sunflowers to put on a cake. One thing led to another and I end up making a whole basket of flowers ! Anyway, here are some pictures I took while making this cake today.

This is the sun flower mould that I wanted to try :

Leaving them to dry.

Making the basket weave pattern with that roller thingy :

I used a dummy cake for this, with just one layer of fondant. Crimped the base and top part.

Basket is ready.

Now to make the piece of cloth, to put on the basket. I arranged some tiny cut out flowers and roll them to incorporate it into the base white fondant. No need to put so many flowers like me, the whole thing is going to be covered with flowers anyway.

After this is done, I arranged my sun flowers and leaves. This is when I realized that there were too little flowers. By then, I was already tired, further more the electricity went off a few times due to the heavy rain and I was decorating in the dark. I took the short cut way and used the ivy cutters to add more deco. After much propping and concealing, this is the final result :

I guess I’m the first person to combine sun flowers and ivy . Maybe a better cake next time.

Pulled or finger flowers are flowers which are made without using any cutters or special equipment. They are easy to do and just needs some molding with your fingers. These are the steps to make a basic blossom.

First, make a round pea-sized shape out of the gumpaste or fondant. Use the end of your paint brush or something sharp, and stick it into the ball to make a cone shape.

While the stick is still attach to the cone, use a sharp knife to cut five equal size for the flower petals.

Open up the petals and you will get a basic blossom like this. Pinch each petal and pull it or shape it until you get a round nice petal.

Once that is done, just open up the flower by inserting the stick again.

If you want, you can add a wire into the flower. For cupcakes or cake deco, just use the flowers straight away, allowing some time for it to dry.

This is the basic step. You could add stamens to the center of the flower, or pull it to a longer shape, add more petals. Many ways to make more types of flowers out of this.

Hope you will find this tutorial useful. So, if you don’t have any cutters, don’t despair, you could still be creative and make beautiful finger flowers .

Salam,

I was leafing through my cake decorating book and saw this beautiful frangipani flowers (kemboja). Tried doing it last night, the gumpaste flowers were left to dry in egg cartons on top of my fridge. Somehow, I find this method always speed up the drying of the flowers. By today, the frangipanis are quite hard. So, this is the cake I came out with :

The gumpaste flowers, to me, doesn’t really look real. I tried to make a blooming frangipani, but it was quite difficult as the base of the petal is too thin and breaks easily. So I guess I’ll have to stick to not-so-blooming kemboja.

For the cake, I use two layers of fondant. Then I make the swag. You can learn how to make the swag (yang macam langsir tu..) from cakecentral.com. Add the tiny pearls at the base of the cake. Lastly, I arrange the flowers and leaves. I’ll do a post on how to make the frangipani later, ok. For the shiny look, I squeeze a few drops of lemon juice, added my pearl dust and painted the swags and the red pearly thingy.

I guess that’s it. My swags and ribbon do need some improvement. But I’m quite happy with the results .

Bye for now,

p/s : 13/5/08 - I found a good tutorial on how to make the frangipanis. Click here.

Do give it a try. It’s not that difficult, you only need patience and perseverance till you get it right .

Salam,