Gum Paste Flowers

Played around with gum paste for the first time today. After a total of 8 hours moulding and sculpting I only managed to make 4 roses, 3 carnations, 3 daisies, 3 cala lilies and bunch of leaves. If you ask me, for all this work, I'd much rather have real flowers on my wedding cake...but then again, you can't really eat those flowers. Ideally, it would be good to let the gum paste dry for at least 48 hours before putting them on a cake, to make sure they get nice and hard. 

Roses

Gumpaste flowers are time consuming because of all the effort spent in softening out the edges using the ball tool and waiting for the layers to dry. Cutting the flowers out is a breeze if you have the right cutters. I can't imaging cutting out the rose, petal by petal. Even the calyx for the rose is a special cutter. 

The daisies are interesting. After using the daisy cutter, the petals were split in half with a knife and then softened using the tip on an ordinary wooden skewer! They had dry upsidedown so that the petals wouldn't droop. The centres of the daisies were rolled in cornmeal to give them that pollen effect.

small Daisy behind the Rose

Gum paste is also excellent to make ruffles with. Because of it's "gumminess" the ruffles look more natural and are less prone to cracking than ruffles made with fondant. You can't really see it in the photo, but there are 4 layers of ruffles on this dummy cake, in "ombre" shades of purple. The cala lilies are not actually stuck on the cake. I was using the cake as a stand to dry the liles on to help give them that natural drooping look. The centers of the lilies are rolled in cornmeal, just like the daisies.

Cala Lilies

Making the carnations was similar to the daisies, minus cutting the petals in half. After punching out the petals using the carnation cutter, simply use the wooden skewer again to soften the edges. These carnations are made of 3 layers of carnation petals, with the last layer being made using a larger cutter. 

Carnations

After making the flowers, it's a good idea to make grean leaves as fillers. And if you like, you can bother with flower tape and tape up all the stems. You can even make a nice flower arrangement or bouquet with all the flowers you've done afterwards. They will definitely brighten up any cake.