Home › Recipes › To Make Flowers for Cake Ornaments
To Make Flowers for Cake Ornaments
Flower making of icing and gum paste is a trade of itself and it is generally cheaper to buy than to make them. But it often happens that the ready made article is not obtainable and we must do the best we can. Dip three or four sheets of writing paper in some wax melted on a plate and form the flowers with the cornets or brass tubes on the waxed paper. The cornet that has the point cut off slantwise when pressed will discharge the icing in a narrow ribbon form and it is not difficult with that to form five rounded leaves, the points all meeting in the center and making a pansy, or a number of narrower petals around a centre like a dahlia. To make the conventional red and white roses a core, or little pyramid an inch high has first to be made and let dry to form them on. These coves are of stiff icing forced out of a cornet and drawn up high. They should stand on small pieces of waxed paper. When dry and hard wrap a morsel of the ribbon icing pressed out of the cornet over the point of the core, like the inside leaf of a rosebud. After suddenly breaking off the ribbon commence again at the back of the first leaf and form another, covering the point of the core on the other side. Let the next leaf lean outwards a little and the next still more, making them all adhere to the core by one edge of the ribbon and making the rose leaves larger and larger till the core is covered and there is room for no more. The flat four and five leaved flowers, such as resemble apple blossoms and pansies, should be painted with a few fine lines of color. The roses are made red by coloring the icing they are made of.
After learning to use the cornets in making borders on cakes and making flowers, to make raised ornamental work, such as lattice work, fences, sides of temples, etc, to be raised up and joined together on the cakes, or baskets and other objects it is only necessary to know that all such may be made on paper coated with white wax, and when the object is dry and hard the paper can be warmed and it will slip off.
Most of the white plaster-like ornaments for cakes in the confectioners' windows, such as birds, baskets, lace leaves, vases and twelfth-cake figures are made of gum paste, a compound that could be eaten but probably never is, although it is one-half sugar.
This is a working method rather than a formula, written for a shop hand who already knew how to mix icing. The gaps are in the materials, not the technique, and everything here can be done with modern equipment.
- The hinge: icing consistencyNothing else in the method works unless the icing holds a sharp edge. Cores and petals both want stiff royal icing at full peak; anything slacker will slump into a blob before it dries. Beat it until a lifted spoonful stands without bending, and keep the bowl covered with a damp cloth as you work.
- CornetsA cornet is a cone rolled from parchment or greaseproof paper, snipped at the tip. The slanted cut the author describes gives a flat ribbon of icing; the modern equivalent is a petal tip such as a No. 103 or 104, held with the wide end toward the core.
- Waxed paper, without the meltingDipping writing paper in melted wax was how you got a non-stick surface in the period. Commercial waxed paper, parchment, or squares of acetate do the same job and release cleanly with no warming at all.
- What "icing" means hereRead it as royal icing: confectioners' sugar beaten with egg white and a squeeze of lemon. If the flowers will be eaten rather than lifted off as ornaments, use pasteurised egg white or meringue powder, since this icing is never cooked.
- Gum pasteThe period compound was sugar bound with gum tragacanth, which is still sold but expensive. Modern gum paste uses tylose or CMC powder and behaves the same way: rolls to a translucent thinness, dries bone hard, technically edible and almost never eaten.
- Painting the petalsUse gel or liquid food colour on a fine brush, thinned with a drop of clear alcohol so it dries fast and does not dissolve the surface. Victorian confectioners' colours were not always food-safe; nothing sold as food colouring today carries that problem.
- Drying and storageSmall flowers need several hours; a rose built on a core needs overnight in a dry room. Damp air is the enemy, so do not refrigerate them. Once hard they keep for months in a lidded box with a little silica gel or dry rice.
- Raised workFor lattice, fences and temple sides, pipe the pieces flat, dry them completely, then join them upright with fresh icing as glue. Pipe a spare of every piece; they break more often than they survive the lift.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of trade manuals Jessup Whitehead wrote for Chicago hotel and restaurant kitchens in the 1880s and 1890s, and the tone here is characteristic: a professional telling other professionals that flower making "is a trade of itself" and that buying is usually cheaper than making. That was literally true. Ornamental confectionery was a specialist branch with its own workshops supplying bakers with ready-made gum paste birds, vases and lace leaves, and a pastry cook was expected to know the technique only for the days when the supplier failed him. The "twelfth-cake figures" he mentions in passing point back to the elaborately decorated Twelfth Night cakes of the British nineteenth century, whose display in confectioners' windows was a January spectacle before the custom faded; the heavy ornamented cake is often said to have migrated from there to weddings, though that account is more commonly repeated than documented. The distinction he draws at the end, between something that could be eaten and something that never is, marks the point where cake decoration had become sculpture in sugar rather than food.