I'm having a Peggy Porschen Moment (I wish!)

I've always wanted to attend one of Peggy Porschen's sugar flower classes, but for me, for various reasons, this wasn't practical, so, when I saw Peggy's latest book, Cakes in Bloom, I was beyond excited and pre-ordered it as soon as I could. And, as you may have noticed, things have been somewhat quiet around here since it arrived on or about 22 May 2014. The Cakes in Bloom book is full of the most stunning floral cakes complete with instructions on how to make them.

One of the best things about Peggy's books is that she includes full details, including the brands, of the cutters, veiners and colours that she used, so that you can get as close to her look as possible.

Naturally, I decided to start with a simple small cake featuring just a few sugar flowers, and then, I saw the cake on page 58 of Cakes in Bloom called "Vintage Blooms". I had always wanted to make a cake like this, with the full on sugar flower effect and decided that I was up for the challenge, even though, I have never made any wired sugar flowers before.

A little bit of practice in a few spare hours, over many weeks, maybe, months and here is one cake finished. Peggy's style leaves space between the flowers to give a light and airy look so that the light can shine through the flowers and I tried to do this with my sugar flower arrangement too.

Peggy provides really clear instructions in her book, but, reading a book is never going to instantly provide me with the years of experience or the eye for subtle balance of colour that Peggy has. Peggy's flowers form a beautiful dome shape on her cake and although I haven't achieved the same shape on my cake, I am happy with the result, considering these are the first wired sugar flowers I have made and used to decorated a cake.  Although, I know that when I look back at this cake is a year or two, I will probably cringe and want to make it all over again - a little bit better.

A special thank you to my lovely and talented husband Gareth, for helping me take the cake pictures above.

To see more about the stages of making this cake, keep reading!

This cake required the following sugar flowers

One wired full blown rose (not shown here)

Three rose buds in different stages of opening cut, made, dusted and steamed

10 rose leaves cut, veined, wired, dusted and steamed

20 hydrangeas cut, veined, wired, dusted and steamed

40 tiny white stephanotis, cut shaped and dusted with white for extra brightness

When I first started making sugar flowers I though that it would be the making of the flowers that would be the difficult part. Whilst making sugar flowers, can be tricky even these ones here that are relatively simple, it turns out that that is not the hard part. The hard part is in fact arranging the sugar flowers on a cake.

Faced with a cake and a good few handfuls of roses, hydrangeas and stephanotis is rather daunting. Where to start? I followed Peggy's instructions and start by arranging my flowers and leaves into sub-assemblies.

Groups of three hydrangeas

Groups of three leaves

Groups of three stephanotis.

I took my sub-assemblies and started at the middle of the cake working my way outwards to arrange the flowers and I think that I just about got away with it. If I was making the cake again, I might try arranging all the flowers into one bouquet, before adding it to the cake, which is the way Peggy did hers and see how that works out.

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Naked Glamorous Chocolate Brownies

You know how I like to glam up my chocolate brownies, so they don't feel left out among all the uber gorgeous cupcakes, well, I was inspired by the trend for naked cakes, that seem to be so popular lately, to make a naked glamorous chocolate brownie. And here they are.

 I think these are the most glamorous of the glamorous brownies yet. I used the hand moulded fondant roses, that I have only just learnt to make and wrote about in this post.

I use these little star shaped flowers a lot as filler flowers or little extra decorations. There is a little mini tutorial on how to make them here. The leaves are just made with a standard rose leaf plunger cutter.

What do you think? Glamorous enough for you? Gooey and chocolatey enough for you?

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Little Star Blossoms

I use these little star blossoms a lot as filler flowers or extra decorations, they are super easy to make, so I thought I would share a quick tutorial on how to make them. My five year old son can make these competently, so there are no excuses for not having a go!

Equipment

To make them you will need

A little six petal flower cutter (this one is from the stephanotis set from sunflower sugarart, UK, USA)

A Dresden Tool

Something for the centre (I used a JEM daisy centre)

You will also need:

Some sugar flower paste / gum paste or some sugar paste with CMC / Gum Tragacanth mixed in to make it less sticky and more pliable. Colour your flower paste before you start. I have used Sugarflair's cream gel colour here.

A little vegetable fat (Trex / Crisco)

A little cornflower (preferably in one of those muslim pouches that sugar crafters like)

A board for cutting out on

A foam flower making board

Making the Flowers

Rub a little vegetable fat (Trex / Crisco) onto a cutting board. The vegetable fat helps keep the flower paste on the board, whilst you roll and also stops the flowers from sticking when you have cut them out. Roll out you paste thinly and cut out a few more flowers than you think you need. (Something usually goes a bit awry with one or two, so best to make allowances for that and then hopefully it won't happen)

Next dust your foam board with a little cornflower and use the Dresden tool to shape the petals, as shown below, by gently rocking the Dresden tool from side to side. Cornflour is every sugar crafters secret weapon, a lot of the techniques simply won't work without it.

Continue all the way around till all the petals are shaped

Make a centre for the flower, I have used this little daisy centre by JEM, sugar pearls make good centres too.

Finally, finished flowers on a floral bouquet cookie. This cookies is currently undergoing a design review. In my head it looked brilliant, when made, I felt the design doesn't quite work. I still like the idea, so it will get revisited, one day!

Projects that use these flowers, or very similar ones

Naked Glamorous Chocolate Brownies

Daphne's Birthday Cake

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Sugar Roses

Is there anything that you are so afraid of doing, that you daren't even start, just in case, you are no good at it, and, if you were no good at it, that could be the end of everything that you are trying to achieve. Well, for me that is the sugar rose. The rose has always been my favourite flower and I see so many beautiful sugar roses, that I want to be able to emulate, but, I can't even begin to try for fear of failing.

I don't know whether you saw her, but a little while back Peggy Porschen was on Paul Hollywood's Pies and Puds (a TV programme) and Peggy gave Paul a quick demonstration of how to make hand moulded fondant roses. Whilst they were chatting, Peggy mentioned, that when looking for new staff, one of the things she does, is get them to make these roses. The prospective staff make ten and Peggy looks to see if there is an improvement between the first and the last.

This little snippet was just the motivation I needed to have a go. I felt, I didn't need to make ten perfect roses, I just need rose number ten to be an improvement on rose number one. The next time I had a spare hour, I resolved to make 10 hand moulded roses, As it happened I ran out of time after the first six. I say six, I made quite a lot more than 6, but, most were scrunched up and started again. The first six I made, that survived, are these peachy coloured ones that you can see above and below. I have to say that I felt a little disheartened, they weren't really looking the way I wanted them too and I couldn't see much improvement. In fact the first one that I made was probably the best.

Rather than throwing a strop and chucking the lot out of the window, I decided to do a little research and do you know what? I discovered, that if you look closely and critically at the hand moulded fondant roses that others have made, they are not always that perfect, but somehow when combined with other decorations on a cake, they manage to look beautiful.

Some roses, do manage to always be beautiful and perfect and I started a new Pinterest board for different types of perfect sugar roses for when I need reference or inspiration.

These red roses are my second attempt at the hand moulded roses that I tried a couple of weeks after the peachy ones, I decided to make them smaller in size and just make a bud style of rose, that is, a centre and three petals. This lovely red colour is Beau sugar paste's "Vintage Rose", this is quite a soft paste, so I added a little CMC powder to help firm the paste up a bit.

I'm happier with these, I'm going to try them on some cakes and see how they look.

I think every cake decorator has their own style of hand moulded rose, it becomes a very personal thing and it is possible to recognise some cake makers from their distinctive roses.

Once you start to get the hang of it, the making of these little roses starts to become quite addictive. I had another go with these ivory ones.  I thought I would try them with a darker centre for a little variety.

When I have made another few hundred, I may have some roses to be truly proud of, hopefully, these are good enough for now.

just using a different brand of sugar paste /  fondant gives these roses a different look. These ivory coloured ones are made with Squires Kitchen sugar paste. This already has a little gum tragacanth in it, so I didn't add anything else. This sugar paste was softer than that for the red roses that I made above, so they have a softer frillier look to them.

Making the Roses

The only equipment you need for these is your hands and an A4 plastic wallet (the sort you normally use for filing things in ring binders). Start by cutting down the side and bottom of the plastic wallet, so that it is just joined down one of the longer sides.

Next, make three little balls of sugar paste and a sausage shape

Place them inside your plastic wallet and squash them flat. Then use your thumb along one edge to make it thinner

Roll up the flattened sausage shape to make the centre of the rose bud

Next, add the petals, overlapping them.

Some things I particularly noticed from my research:

- The spiral in the centre is the keystone to a good looking rose

- Keep the petals in close to the centre

- Don't let the petals rise too far above the centre

Roll the base of the rose between your fingers to achieve the bud shape and remove the excess sugar paste.

Use your fingers to gently tease back the tops of the petals and then place them on a foam mat to harden until ready to use

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Vanilla Spice Latte Cupcakes Part Two - The Desirability of Buttercream?

I feel that our friend, the dear cupcake is fighting a defining battle. On the one hand we have the delicious looking scrumptious cupcakes topped with decadent towering swirls of buttercream and dripping with caramel or chocolate sauce and on the other the sophisticated smooth beauty of the fondant domes, understated and refined, beautiful and oh so wedding ready. These cupcakes above and all those below are the Vanilla Spice Latte Cupcakes that I shared with you last time. They are a coffee and cardamom flavoured cupcake topped with swirls of vanilla buttercream.

I'm a big fan of both buttercream swirls and fondant topped cupcakes and combined the two in this cupcake tower for John and Fiona's wedding, but, you know what? and it is really hard for me to say this, but, there is something about those fondant topped cupcakes, that, well, just doesn't make me want to eat them, at least not in that, I have to have that delicious swirl of buttercream, right now and keep eating them until I feel sick kind of way.

I know that I am not alone in this, I have taken batches of cupcakes to work and found quite often any fondant topped ones are left forlornly alone at the end of the day, their buttercream topped cousins having been devoured hungrily many hours previously. Maybe people see fondant and think of that cheap chemical tasting stuff that covers those cheap supermarket Birthday cakes? Or maybe they say, "Oh, those are too pretty to eat", but nothing truly delicious and scrumptiously tempting was ever too pretty to eat? Was it?

My husband thinks that this is just people's greed - they take the buttercream swirls because they look the biggest and I think there is some truth in this, but there must be something more behind this preference too. I don't know whether you saw it, but there was an episode of Horizon that aired in the UK at the end of January this year that featured some research by Paul Kenny of the Scripps Institute that discovered that foods that had about 50 / 50 ratio of fat to sugar, may stimulate the pleasure centre of the brain so much that we can't resist or stop eating them. Scroll down to the bottom of this post to read more about this.

And do you know what? buttercream just happens to be pretty much a 50 / 50 fat to sugar ratio. Well, whatever the reason, I decided to try prettying up my buttercream swirl cupcakes with some sugar flowers to see if they could compete in the looks department with those fondant tops and these iare what I came up with.

The large flowers are the same as I used on the Chocolate and Caramel Giant  Cupcake I made last year that was raffled for charity, except that I changed the flower centre to a coffee bean, I thought this was a minor stroke of genius and hope that you agree. I tried the flowers n two different colours, ivory to represent the cafe latte flavour and green to be reminiscent of the cardamom.

So what do you think? Do you want to eat one of these, or would you prefer the plain old buttercream swirl? 

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This is how the Express summed up the research referred to above

"Feeding laboratory rats with either high-fat and high-sugar diets did little to change their daily habits or health but supply them with chocolate, biscuits and cheesecake (a near 50-50 fat and sugar split) and behaviour changed radically.

They ignored other foods for the cheesecake, going back to it regularly rather than gorging, and put on weight. Their self-regulation system, that naturally stopped them eating too much fat or sugar, effectively switched off.

“It became their main source of calories,” Kenny tells Horizon. “They gained massive amounts of weight, became sedentary, slept a lot and did not move around.

He found that the allure of processed food was overriding the body’s natural hormones that regulate intake by alerting the brain that the body has enough calories. It is the same faculty that is impaired in drug addicts whose On-Off mechanisms are degraded by the release of pleasure hormones in the brain’s hedonic system, he says"

Read the whole article from the Express here if you are interested 

Jewelled Flower Cupcakes

I see lots of beautiful sets of cupcakes, usually made by English ladies, made of complimentary flowers and colours, each slightly different to the other, usually referred to as "vintage", I love these and want to make a set one day. BUT ... Firstly, I struggle to find time to make 20 or 30 of each of the different flowers and pearls and leaves and other beautiful things that are required and secondly, there is always one design that I like more than the others and that is the only one that I want to make, which I suppose is why mostly, my sets of cupcakes or cookies are all the same.

So, here I am, with only a couple of evenings to spare, needing to make some cupcakes to be sold for charity at a craft fair and wanting to make something more than a buttercream swirl with some sprinkles. Everybody loves sprinkles and I love sprinkles, I just wanted to make something a little more me. One of my aims is to learn to make more sugar flowers and I haven't done as many as I would have liked, so seized this opportunity to make some for the cupcakes.

I suppose this flower is a fantasy flower. It is reminiscent, to me, of a peony, although it is made with a hollyhock cutter. The one I used is from a Sunflower Sugarart set. I love the crinkly outline of the petals.

The Cupcakes were made with this recipe from the Hummingbird Bakery Recipe book and my own chocolate butter cream recipe. The chocolate butter cream swirls are piped with a Wilton 1M nozzle.

Making the flowers

You will need

1. Flower cutter and silicone veiner. I used one from Sunflower Sugarart

2. Sugar florist paste in whatever colour you want to use for the petals.

3. Sugar florist paste in whatever colour you want to use for the centres.

4. A ball tool

5. A Dresden tool

6. Round flower formers. I used ones from Wilton, or you can scrunch tin foil into shape

7. A mould for the centre of the flower. The one I used is the Karen Davies Vintage Brooch Mould

8. Lustre dusts and edible glitter. See below for the details of the ones I used.

9. A little vegetable fat (trex/crisco), cornflour / cornstarch and a little edible glue.

Start by rolling out the sugar florist paste as thin as you can and cut out a flower shape. Use the ball tool to stretch the petals and thin the edges a little.

Press the cut out and thinned flower between the two parts of the silicone mould and press together to add the veining. You will notice that the two parts of the mould have  little notch so that you can line them up properly.

I wanted my veining to be a little more prominent, so I used a Dresden tool to make some of the markings deeper. This flower doesn't really look that special yet, it is amazing how it is transformed with a little lustre, a centre and a shape.

I popped the veined flowers into some curved flower formers to take shape whilst I made some centres for the flowers. I  knew that I wanted a stylised centre for my flower, first of all I tried this moulded button, below. It is cute, but, not quite what I was looking for.

Next, I tried the little jewelled centre, below. This was just the look I wanted, so I set about transforming it with a little petal dust, lustre dust and edible glitter.

The mould that I used for the centres, is this Vintage Brooch Mould by Karen Davies.

Moulds are so easy to use, take a small ball of sugar florist paste and work it till soft, roll it into a little ball and press it into the mould that you want to use. Smooth around the edges and remove any excess, then pop out the moulded paste

To paint the centres, I used:-

1. Sugarflair pearl ivory lustre dust all over
2. Edible Art edible glitter in baby blue in the centre
3. Sugarflair  autumn leaf petal dust to add colour around the outside
4. Squires Kitchen gold sparkles on top of the autumn leaf colour

After sticking the jewelled centre in the centre of the flower with a little water, I brushed a little more of the gold sparkles lustre dust on the centre of the petals

Then, back in the flower former to finish drying

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