Signs of Spring!





This beautiful magnolia tree is in full bloom.  This is on my "to do" list as something to embroider. 

My sugar partner and I made these small daffodils for an order.  Their stems are hanging below the apple tray.





These are sugar pansies in the first stages.  They still need to be dusted and steamed and their little faces painted.  I'll post the "after" photo next week.

Canada Blooms

This is the cake that members of CSSA (Canadian Society of Sugar Artistry) made for the Canada Blooms show.  To our great surprise our booth won "Best Booth in the Show" 

These are the peonies that my friend and I helped to make and I posted about a couple of weeks ago.

CSSA members also made this cake to celebrate the Genie Awards which are given out to recognize the best of Canadian cinema by the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television that was held during the week of Canada Blooms.  



The cake was in a very pretty setting sitting beside an orchid "tree".



Flowers - Sugar and Thread

Mary Corbett's Needle & Thread arrives in my e-mail inbox every day.  She asked the question: "Do you have other crafts and hobbies that you pursue, in addition to embroidery?".  Yes I do, my other wonderful hobby is cake decorating, especially making sugar flowers.  Here's examples of some that I have made.

Here are sugar calla lilies, and underneath calla lilies in stumpwork 

 



These are sugar hydrangeas



And here and below are stumpwork hydrangeas

This is a sugar cherry blossom tree

A silk ribbon rose tree

A sugar wild rose, or briar rose



And a silk ribbon rose




These are sugar hybrid tea roses



And these are ribbon roses

Sil

And finally some sugar pansies just waiting to be included in a spray for a cake.

Silk ribbon pansies

One thing I realize is that I love flowers - sugar, silk and real!

Sugar roses

Sugar roses for a Christening cake this weekend. It's amazing to see these little guys take shape over a couple of hours. They are not finished yet, they still need that little seed bud under the calyx, dusted with petal dust and steamed, and the wires wrapped. I'll post a photo of the finished sprays.

Gum paste tulips

In the Fall I received an order for tulips for a wedding cake. This is how they looked. If anyone wants a tutorial on them, I'll be happy to do it for you. If the tutorial isn't following this post, please go to the side bar and search the label for tulip tutorial. Click on it and this post and the tutorial will now be on your screen.

Wednesday is Cake day!

For a few years now my cake friend Verdie and I have saved Wednesday afternoons to play around with sugar!

Today we had a fun day first of all finishing off white roses and leaves for an October wedding.

After that we decided to try making a flower that neither of us had tried before. It was pictured on a wedding cake in one of our books, no name, no instructions. We thought it was a gardenia, but it turned out to be frangipani.

Here's a quick tutorial on how to make this flower:

I used an orchid petal cutter. The petals are quite waxy, so roll the gum paste out fairly thickly. Tool the edge just slightly.

Fold the petals in half and slightly twist them.

Brush a little water on the bottom on each petal and layer them, one on top of the other. Fold the two outside petals around to join.

Adjust petals, and pinch off any excess paste from bottom. At this point you can push a moistened hooked wire into the bottom of the flower. Here are our first attempts. When they have dried, we'll dust the middles cream and steam them to give a nice sheen. These are without wire so will be attached to a cake with royal icing.

Setting up

Tonight we set up our tables for the business expo tomorrow and Sunday. The table looked very nice.

Cakes on show this weekend

My cake partner Verdie and I will have a table of our cake decorating this Saturday and Sunday at her Church in Scarborough. This will be our 3rd year at this business expo there, and we have created some new display cakes and spruced up a few that were in a recent competition. The pictures show six 4 1/2" mini cakes and decorated sugar cookies. Last year's Sunday attendance was more than one thousand people and we made some good contacts which resulted in a few orders and some students for our gumpaste flowers course.