Wilton Flowers and Cake Design - Lesson #2

Week 2 focused on royal icing flowers.  Royal icing is a sugar/water/egg white (or meringue powder) mix that dries very hard.  This lets you make cake decorations in advance and transfer them when you are ready.  As with most things in this class and gum paste and fondant, I wouldn't recommend eating these decorations since they aren't very tasty.  When I was a kid, my cousins and I would fight over who got the flowers on birthday cakes from the supermarket - I'm pretty sure they were royal icing roses and as kids we wanted the hit of pure sugar :)

Here's what we did in Lesson 2:

• Created the royal icing rose.  Once again, I struggled with getting my rose to look like a rose.
• Made the "apple blossom" (second picture)
• Made the primrose (third picture)
• Made rosebuds

I have not yet been able to figure out the right consistency for making icing roses.  With royal icing or with buttercream, they always seem too soft and "melty".  The practicing continues.  The apple blossom (I've heard of cherry blossoms, but not apple blossoms!) and primrose were a bit easier, although I think my icing curved up too high on the primrose.  I think a cake full of apple blossoms would be adorable -- maybe in rainbow colors!  I had a hard time getting the rosebuds to look correct, partially because I am left-handed and all the instructions and samples were done by right-handed people.  In the case of this flower, I think the handedness affects the direction of the blossoms.  I think that these are weird because I can't picture how they would lay out on a cake, since they are a flat side view of a flower, rather than an overhead view like all of the other flowers we've done.

Next week, more flowers!

Check out my post about Lesson #1.