Learning to make sugar flowers with Alan Dunn

 As promised, here they finally are; the results of three intense days of tutelage under Alan Dunn, probably one of the best sugar flower artists in the world.  During those three days I experienced the whole gamut of emotions ranging from complete and utter self-doubt; "God, I'll never be able to these like he does" to hope and exhilaration; "Hey, not bad for someone as inexperienced as myself!"

On meeting him for the first time I was pleasantly surprised.  I think I had set myself up to expect him to be somewhat arrogant and worldly, but the man who answered my knock on his door was gentle, unassuming and infinitely patient.  He made me feel completely at home and relaxed, making the three days I spent with him very pleasant.

On day one we plunged right into the deep end and he taught me how to make this breathtaking open peony.  Watching him roll out these ultra-thin petals I was struck how easy he made it look.  My first efforts were pathetic compared to him and I was downright embarrassed! However, he remained patient and eventually he declared that we have enough petals to create a peony.  Putting all those wired petals together and wrapping them in florists tape was  harder than making the petals!  I really felt I had 10 thumbs and had great difficulty getting them wrapped tight enough.  But I got it, eventually!

 On my list of things I wanted to learn, I had put down lilies of the valley.  They are my absolute favourite flowers and though I had imagined them to be tricky to make, I still wanted to know how.  To my infinite surprise and delight, they turned out to be the easiest of all!  In fact, they were so easy that I almost felt disappointed.  When I was setting these lilies of the valley up to be photographed, I added a real one in the middle just for comparison.

 Sweet peas were also on my wishlist,  mainly because I simply couldn't fathom how they were constructed. Again, though not exactly simple, Alan's way of making them was far simpler than I could have imagined.  Putting them together was trickier, and although this picture makes them look nice, the petals on my blossoms were in fact a bit wobbly.  I should point out that the sweet pea buds and the uppermost flower are done by Alan himself.  Only the lower two are mine.  Even so, without me asking he wired them all together to make this single stem.

 No flower course would be complete without a lesson on how to make a rose.  The rose is far and away the most popular flower to put on cakes, but also one of the hardest in my mind.  It's not just a matter of putting all the petals together to make a rose, but learning to give the bloom life is an art form in itself.    What surprised me the most was how many petals are needed just for the centre.  Alan kept coaxing me to wrap them tighter and tighter, and to add more and more petals.  Just making that one rose took up most of day two.  In a moment of self-doubt I made some comment about being so very slow, but he was quick to reassure me that no, they take a lot of time and that he's had students much slower than me.

 When browsing through his website prior to the course, I came upon a picture of a butterfly he had made.  it was so breathtakingly delicate and beautiful, that I put that down on my wishlist as well.  By the time he showed me how to construct the body, I was no longer surprised at his attention to detail. Not only did he include the head, thorax and body, but antennae and a proboscus too!

I could go on and on with blow by blow accounts of how exactly we achieved these amazing flowers and the sheer effort (for me) to make them.  There was so much to absorb in each day that I was literally too exhausted to do anything in the evenings.  To be sure, good technique (and a steady hand) are essential for making good sugar flowers, but at the end of it all I don't think that was the biggest lesson I learned with Alan.  He never actually came out and said it, but listening to him, observing him in the garden during our lunch breaks, watching him demonstrate how to create a certain kind of petal, it dawned on me that how one actually sees a flower is what really counts.

Though I have always had an affinity to nature, I haven't ever truly studied flowers and how exactly they are constructed until now.  I have a computer full of photographs of all kinds of flowers and blossoms I have taken over the years, but still I never thought to look so close as to see the relationship between petals, sepals stamens and calixes before.  At first glance a columbine looks so very complex, but this morning I stopped and studied one on my way to the bakery and realized that in fact it was much simpler than I had ever suspected.  I studied flowering hawthorn, rambling roses, forget-me-nots and a host of other flowers this morning and marveled at nature's engineering.  Along with this child-like marveling, I am itching to put my lessons and observations into practice and start making flowers for no other reason than to recreate what nature has designed so well.

In closing I cannot resist including a picture of beautiful Lizy, Alan's oriental black cat.  This little imp provided endless hours of entertainment and comic relief with her attention-getting antics.  By far the most amusing cat I have ever met and I have fallen head over heels in love with her.

Easter rush....

 This Easter was definitely the most rushed and "unholiday-like" that I have experienced!  All work and no play as the saying goes.  Unfortunately it was so busy that almost the only quality time I had with my daughters was just prior to Easter when I thought to include them in the Easter cupcake process.  With no tutorials and armed only with our imaginations the three of us sat down to create some Easter chicks and bunnies for cupcake toppers.

 We worked hard, laughed a lot and made an unholy mess of my "studio" and came up with some cute little figures.  I then baked and iced some cupcakes and again gave my daughters free rein to decorate the cuppies as they wished.  This is what they came up with.  I thought they were adorable and this box was proudly presented to my brother and niece when they stopped by for the night on their way back to England.

 Easter weekend continued at a frenetic pace with three birthday cakes to complete.  Below is my first ever attempt at a Barbie cake.  I wasn't happy with the draping of the over skirt, realizing after the cake was done and delivered that I could have first made the over skirt and then added the draping separately. Aah well, we live and learn!

 I also got to make another Minnie Mouse cake, which was interesting to compare to my first attempt a year ago.  Looking at it critically I feel that although this one has a far better finish and looks more professional, the proportions aren't as perfect as on the first one.  The ears are too close together, the bow is too narrow, etc etc etc.  I also experimented with my extruding gun to make the "piping" that trimmed the face and formed the letters.  I bought the extruding gun when I was at the Lorraine McKay course in Maastricht earlier this year, but except to make hair I haven't had the time to play with it to see what else it can do.  I really liked how easy it was to make "piping" and saw the beginning of a long and meaningful friendship with this handy little gadget.

 Easter Sunday was spent creating yet another birthday cake, this time for a colleague of mine.  This cake was challenging on so very many levels that I found it hard to know where to begin.  The cake had to be gluten free.  The flavour was to be a complete surprise, as was the theme.  The cake had to include marzipan and be as "fondant free" as possible.  I decided to recruit the help of my colleague's husband and instantly regretted it.  He wanted the cake to have a "Strandkorb" which is a German beach chair for two that can be folded away into a huge basket.  The beach had to be reminiscent of the beaches on the island of Sylt in the North Sea.

Originally I thought to cover the cake in marzipan to represent the sand, but the only marzipan I could find was very dark, and since the sands of Sylt are almost white I rejected that idea.  However, the problem remained on how to incorporate marzipan into the cake.  Hmmmm.....Finally it came to me:  A chocolate cake made with rice and corn flour, filled with marzipan and raspberry coulis.  So after much experimentation  on how to soften the marzipan and much consultation with experts on the internet, I concocted a marzipan spread out of brandy, heavy cream and marzipan.

Now came the next problem; what else other than marzipan can one use to cover a cake that is not too sweet?  White chocolate ganache!  Whipped up to lighten the texture and to enable me to make it look like sand.  The sand dunes were made of white chocolate modelling paste which I placed on the cake prior to icing it with the ganache.  I used MM fondant dyed blue to make the waves and to cover the board.  I made shells out of modelling chocolate and used them to decorate the base of the cake.

The Strandkorb was hugely challenging as I had to work out the construction in a way that it would be properly supported.  In the end I had to create a sand dune out of modelling chocolate to support the back rest.  Even so, it was leaning far more horizontally than I had originally intended it to be!

So that was my Easter.  Busy, busy, busy, but oh so much fun!

Weddings and romance

No sooner had I written my last entry when things got busy again. By last Sunday I was so tired that I actually was not looking forward to decorating any more cakes.  An alarming state of affairs!  Nevertheless I took a deep breath, grabbed a large mug of very strong tea and got to work on my last cake for the week.  Fortunately it was a relatively easy cake and one that I have done before.  You can take a look at my latest football themed cake in my  photo gallery.

In my last entry I also talked about making a wedding cake for practice, but not two days went by when lo and behold I got my first order for a bona fide, real wedding cake.  Sooo, it was scrap the practice and jump in the deep end.  Fortunately it was for only 35 people which made the task just a little less daunting.  I was given very little instruction as to how the cake was supposed to look, except what involved the topper.  There is a very inside joke involving "soup chicks", thus I was asked to make a bridal hen and rooster in a bowl of soup, with the bride's cat somehow involved.  This is what I came up with.

Below is a picture of the whole cake complete with topper.  The side design mimics the pattern on the bride's dress and is painted freehand directly on the cake.  My original idea was to pipe the design on with black royal icing, but my piping skills are so rusty, that after a couple of practice runs on a dummy cake I gave up.  Painting black on white was also quite frankly terrifying!  I admit to being so nervous about doing this that I sat in front of the pristine white cake with my paintbrush in hand for ages before I mustered the courage to begin.  In the end it came out better than I expected, but boy, was it stressful!

A little while before this wedding cake a friend of mine had a birthday, so I decided to surprise her with a mini heart shaped cake as a gift.  Vintage style cakes are also very much an in thing these days and now I had a perfect opportunity to try one.  I love the combination of light blue/duck egg with pink and so this colour combination came instantly to mind.  I also had some new jacobean style cutters that were just begging to be tried out.  The combination of tiny roses, pearls and gold was heavily influenced by cupcakes I had seen on Flickr by Cotton and Crumbs.

Easter will be busy with seasonal cupcakes/cakes for family and friends.  The week after Easter promises to be exciting as it has become official that I will be spending 3 days with the renowned Alan Dunn famed for his sugar flowers extraordinaire receiving personal instruction on the fine art of making lifelike flowers!!!  I am thrilled about this opportunity and can hardly wait!  I promise you I will blog ALL about it by the end of April.

Spring flowers

With sunny skies and longer days, spring is definitely here despite the cold nights.  The snowdrops, crocuses and daffodils are in full bloom and it won't be long before the cherry trees start to blossom!  After the inevitable green cake for St. Patrick's Day, I had a relatively quiet weekend to look forward to.  I had a cupcake "sampler" order for Monday which inevitably left me with extra cupcakes. 

For a while I have been itching to try making a cupcake bouquet and now that I had both the time and the cupcakes, I got to work making flowers.  I also got to practice my buttercream roses, which I have to admit I haven't done in years.  The cupcakes are an assortment of vanilla, lemon, strawberry and chocolate flavours.  In the end I was pretty pleased with the result and so was my friend who received it.  She is battling cancer and I thought I would cheer her up with this edible bouquet.  Perhaps next time I make one of these I will try using fancier cupcake cases and more ribbon.  I think this is a great gift idea for anyone who loves cupcakes.

I also had time, finally, to practice making sugarpaste peonies.  Here is a picture of my very first attempt.  Not perfect, but I hope that in time they will get better.  They are not so much impossibly difficult as time consuming; each petal must be hand shaped and shaded and there are so many in each bloom!  To make this peony I followed an online tutorial...in German no less! For those interested the link is http://tortentante.blogspot.com/ .  Monika is a very talented lady whose cakes have won prizes and have been featured in wedding magazines. 

Last but not least, here is this year's St. Pat's Day creation.  Every year the Irish staff members throw a buffet lunch for all staff members at the school and it has become habit for me to provide the cake for them.   I will admit that the leprechaun is recycled from last year's cake, but everything else was fresh!  The beer mug was made from rice krispie treats with the "foam" being Bailey's flavoured buttercream, yum!  I am somewhat amused to see how inordinately popular the rice krispie treats are with the staff.  The Brits like it because I suppose it is a familiar treat from "back  home", but the Germans have been hitherto completely ignorant of this treat.

Next on my wishlist is time to make a tiered wedding cake, just to prove to myself that I can do it.  Tempting as it is to use up every free moment cake decorating, I do have to make time for my family and the garden occasionally!  However, before I get too caught up in the wedding cake theme, I have a birthday cake to create for my husband......

Busy times......

Last week was definitely the busiest I've had since December with cake projects to complete every evening after I came home from my day job.  It was challenging, exhausting, but also exhilarating.  I am always eager to learn new methods, try new things and extend my repertoire in general and last week was no exception! 

This champagne bottle cake was a first for me and much harder than I anticipated.  Having read on the internet that using rice krispie treats is the in thing to use in 3-D models, I decided to use this method for the bottle.  But I had a devil of a time getting the surface smooth enough for my liking.  In the end it came out OK; not perfect, but not so bad for my first effort!

The bucket was relatively easy and I was quite pleased with that.  The flowers were another first for me.  The design is loosely based on that of an anemone, but as you can see, there are no black stamens.  This is primarily because I didn't have any black stamens on hand, and in the end I ran out of time to dye them myself.  At one point I considered painting them on, but came to the conclusion that I liked them better this way.

Below is a close up of another fantasy flower I used last week for a different cake.  For this flower I followed the instructions of a tutorial and it involved wires to put the whole thing together. It was time consuming and a bit fiddly, but well worth the effort in the end! I am in the process of trying to get private tuition from a professional in the art of making realistic sugar flowers.  I yearn to make perfect flowers indistinguishable from the real thing.......

Below is a cake I did for a dear friend of mine at the request of her young daughters.  They knew exactly what they wanted their mother to have, and it was real pleasure to help them out.  This cake is not covered in fondant, as the girls were emphatic that they didn't want it for their Mum.  Instead I covered the cake with whipped ganache, but realised too late that it would have been better to use unwhipped ganache.  The latter would definitely have given a smoother finish! 

This is one of the things I find so frustrating about not being able to do this full-time.  My time is so very limited, being restricted to the evenings and weekends, that if I'm not happy with  the way something came out, I rarely have the time to do it over.  I find myself making more compromises than I am  happy with.  I get so envious when I read how a fellow cake decorator had time to experiment with an entire cake for no other reason than to practice a new technique.  Until I take the plunge and garner the courage to quit my day job, that luxury will not be a part of my life.



Speaking of experimentation, the McDonald's meal pictured below was a huge experiment for me, done with no tutorials or instructions of any kind.  I have never done this before, but I found it great fun, and not nearly as challenging as I expected!  This was all well and good as this was the last of 5 cakes I completed last week and I was literally exhausted.  My tiredness showed in that I made several crucial mistakes in the baking phase, and had to bake the cakes twice, with the first lot going in the bin.  The worst part of this was that it had to be a banana cake and I ran out of over ripe bananas.  Do you have any idea how hard it is to find over ripe bananas in the supermarket when you need them?!  I didn't succeed in finding any, so had to make do with plain old ripe bananas.  I hope the flavour came out ok!

The drink was also made out of rice krispie treats and this time I was smarter.  I covered the rice krispie treats with buttercream frosting and stuck the whole thing in the fridge for an hour or so to harden.  Then I smoothed the frosting before covering it with fondant.  Much easier!

I also made two other cakes, which are pictured in my photo gallery, but not here.  They were easy and fun to do.  By Saturday night I was more tired than I remember being in a loooonnnng time after surviving on barely 5 hours of sleep a night all week.  Yet I was not stressed or strung out.  The true beauty of this work is that I find it so pleasurable, that no matter how busy, or tired I may be, I actually relax when I sit down to make my fondant creations.  And so I look forward to my future projects with glee!

Happy Valentine's Day

It has been a little while since I last blogged; my apologies for that.  On the bright side I have been very busy with various orders, but on the not-so-bright-side I have been bogged down with the usual winter ailments.  Not enough to keep me in bed, but enough to make me feel tired and drained all the time.

This past weekend I had time to bake some cupcakes in celebration of Valentine's Day.  My original plan was to experiment with making fondant covered cupcakes, but in the end I ran short on time and motivation and stuck to my trademark rose swirls.  I did experiment with making so called ribbon roses and was delighted at how quick and easy they were! Suffice it to say that you'll be seeing a lot more of those from me in the future!
                                 
I find that the more I bake, the more I enjoy it.  With every cake I create I get more imaginative and bold.  There are innumerable new techniques and fads out there just waiting for me to try that until recently I simply had no idea about.  My greatest frustration at the moment is that I have so little time to explore and practice these new methods.  I have several video and pdf tutorials that I have purchased, none of which I have had the time to try.  It is soooo tempting to take the plunge, quit my day job and devote myself full-time to this new passion.  However, the knowledge that next year I will have 2 daughters in university and the UK threatening to raise tuition fees radically brings me back to reality.  The orders are coming in steadily, but not yet in the volumes that I would need to devote myself full-time.  All in good time!!

Fairies and dinosaurs

Here they are as promised; the fairy and butterfly cake and the dinosaur cake.  The fairy definitely would have looked very different had I attempted her before I went to Lorraine's course.  As it was I was very pleased with the way the hands and the feet came out.  The face I was not pleased with and I know I really need practice getting the mouth right!  I wasn't really given any specifics for this cake other than it had to be pink and feature fairies and butterflies.  That it did, but I also went waaaayyyy OTT on the flowers.  When it was all finished, I regretted putting so many on, but it was too late to do anything about it.

My daughter reassured me that since the client is 8 years old, she won't think it OTT at all.  You know what? My daughter was right!  she was ecstatic over the cake; I believe her exact words were, "Oohh, that's the most romantic cake I have EVER seen!"

This dinosaur cake was all in all much simpler and far less time consuming than the fairy cake.  I found these cartoonish dinosaurs relatively easy and a lot of fun to make.  Ok, so the brontosaurus gave me a lot of grief because while I was away in Maastricht, the neck snapped off.  Then when I made a new improved head and neck for him I managed to snap the tail off.  At that point I thought it best to throw the whole thing in the bin and start again.  T-Rex was also a little tricky because I found it hard to support him properly so that he would dry in an upright position.  But little Harry also loved his cake, and in the end that's the  most important thing!

By the way, both cakes were bourbon vanilla with vanilla buttercream covered in marshmallow fondant.  More pictures of these and all my cakes can be found in the photo gallery.