Blooming Lovely: Bring Your Cakes To Life With Flowers

Now is definitely the time when people start incorporating icing flowers into their cakes. The weather is turning warmer (a bit) and everywhere you look gardens and hedgerows are peppered with colour. And for those of us with a bad case of brown thumb it might just be the only way we can cultivate roses.

With the Chelsea Flower Show in full swing you can see some of the most incredibly artistic flower arrangements, ideal inspiration. So we’ve collected some helpful tutorials to help you bring some flower power to your next cake.

For Beginners

Use Cutters

If you’re not an experienced sugarcrafter you can still make your cakes gorgeous by using Ready to Roll Icing and a few cutters. To give your flowers a firm finish when done you’ll want to add some flower paste to the icing.

All you need to do is roll out your icing and use a cutter to press out the flower shapes. Use a ball end tool to ruffle the petals and make them more organic looking. Then you can add a centre to it by either using a small ball of icing or even a chocolate bean. You can find a step by step guide here.

Piped Petals With Buttercream

With the right equipment and a steady hand it’s possible to make delicious buttercream flowers, as Alan Tetreault shows you in this detailed and comprehensive video. From delicate leaves for border details, rose buds to finish off a cupcake and dual coloured chrysanthemums the skills are explained in careful detail. The video is full of tips such as how to get your buttercream the right consistency, mixing different colours of icing and how to use different petal tips to achieve specific effects.

Test Your Sugarcrafting By Hand Modelling

For those who are comfortable with crafting icing into models, then creating a Ready to Roll Icing flower by hand lets you make truly unique blooms. There is no limit to the kind of flower you can make this way: roses, tulips, orchids, whatever takes your fancy. To get you started try following our guide on making flowers by hand here.

Tulip Cake Pops

Zoe of Zoe’s Fancy Cakes takes you through the steps needed to make some tasty tulip cake pops in this video. We love the way she uses Colour Melts to create the core of the tulips then layers on icing petals on to give them a realistic appearance. The addition of icing leaves is a nice touch too.

Flowerpot Cake

If you haven’t discovered Yolanda Gampp of How To Cake It you really should. Not only does she create amazing novelty cakes but she has such a warm and welcoming personality you really feel that you can do it too. In this video she shows you how to make a coffee flavoured flowerpot cake. Yolanda’s hints include using Oreo cookies to make a realistic and edible potting soil and how to create a perfect Ready to Roll Icing flowerpot to house the cake. Although Yolanda uses real flowers to finish off the cake we think you should make some icing flowers using the above tutorials, or maybe decorate it with some of Zoe’s tulip cake pops.

To celebrate the Chelsea Flower Show we’re currently running a competition on our Facebook page, Bloom or Bluff?. Come on over and see if you can guess if the flowers are real or made from icing and you could win an amazing hamper of goodies.