Gumpaste Daisies - Two Methods

My New years resolution for 2012 is to practice more of my sugar flowers and refine my piping skills. So you probably going to find a lot of post here on those too for this year.

These are the gum-paste daisies I made for a recent cake.. I know that there are so many site showing you the same stuff. But since my blog is also my journal I thought - why not...! Besides you know how I like to do things a little different.

Now, I do my Daisies two different ways.. Depending on the look I want to achieve.



Flowers Formers
I usually use these silicon baking pans for some of my flowers.. I really like them because I can do many at a time and they aren't expensive...

If you do not have the flower molds you can also use small little objects such as these to make your formers. Just take a piece of foil place it on the bowl, mold the foil to your bowl and use your fingers to give it a little depth.

Now lets begin with the flowers...

Method One..
Now I will not tell you what you need because I have made a lot of gum-paste flowers without the right tools before I became a cake decorator.  I'm using the basic gum-paste decorating tools as you can see in the picture below..

Take your gum paste and knead it well using some vegetable shortening if needed.

Roll your fondant out as thin as you can.. usually to 1/8 of an inch.. If you have those rolling pin guides then it is the purple guide. Yes, I do have those too......!

This is about the thickness of my gum-paste..

Take your daisy cutter, place it on the gum-paste, press it down with your fingers, then jiggle it a bit so you get sharp edges. But instead of just taking it off; pick it up with the gum-paste inside like shown below and neaten the edges with your fingers or a dry brush.

After you neaten the edges, place it on the mat and release the nob on top by pressing on it. You will hear a click sound and the gum paste will fall down.

Now take your paint brush and place it on the petal as shown below. Then using your finger rock it side to side broadening the petals.

And here you can see all the petals have been softened.

Here you can see the difference between the original petal and the one with the softened petals.

Place them in your flower formers.

If you wanted  you could stack two flowers petals together as well to achieve a more fuller look like below.

But I prefer to use a single petal for one flower.

Now for the centers, take two small pea size balls of yellow gum-paste

Take a clean strainer like so..

 

Press down to flatten it so it takes the impression of the strainer.

Next place it in the center of the flower. Check to see if it is the correct size before your stick it with your glue.

This is your flower with the center.... Leave to dry for a couple of days.

Another way to do the center -
Take a pea size ball and flatten it. Use a tweezers and pinch it all over to create some texture...

It will look like this...

Place it in the center of your flower. Leave to dry..

Here are the two flowers with the different centers..

Here are the four I did with the first method, two large and two medium .

Method Two

Another way to do the daisy flowers.

Roll your gum-paste to 1/8 inch and cut out your petal as before. 

Now take your tool and holding it at an angle, pull each petal towards the center of the flower.
Use cornstarch to make sure your petals don't stick to the tools.

Here you can see the difference between the two. 

One whose petals have been softened and the other is just cut out...

Here again if you want you can stack two together to get a fuller look. 

But I prefer just one single petal. 

Go ahead and do the centers the same way as shown above.

Here are the four that I did with the 2nd Method. Two large and two medium.

And here you can see all the flowers with both methods. 

Method One has a more fuller look while; 

Method two has a more slimmer look. 

And here they are all dried up.. and ready to be dusted with some petal dust.

(I know the picture is not very clear, sorry.)

You could either use a green petal dust on the outside of the yellow centers. 

In this case I needed to use them on a white wedding cake so I just lusted them with a bit of white pearl luster dust on the white of the flowers, very lightly.

Here is a wedding cake and two other designs I did recently. As you can see the daisy is a very simple and easy flower to make but it has the potential to brighten any cake be it a weeding cake or a mothers day cake.

This was an anniversary cake that happen to be also on mothers day.

This was a 50th Anniversary Cake

Here are three more wedding cake ideas for you..

And

Well, these were my gum paste daisies,

Thanks for stopping by.

Until next time, 

Happy Cake decorating.

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