More Sugar Flowers with PME

I recently managed to take a quick trip back home.  December is a great time to visit as everyone is so excited about Christmas!! 

My primary reason for this trip was to learn more about sugar flowers at PME cake decorating school in Enfield, near London.  It was a very affordable 4 day intensive course, which was only 250 pounds, which included lunch and as much coffee and tea as we could drink.  I didnt realize at the time, but it was part 3 of a 'master sugar artist' course.  I may return for the other parts in the future.








 We covered so many flowers! 

Starting with some unwired flowers we made gerbera with ivy, a rose, and a Christmas rose and poinsettia. They were all on plaques, which could be prepared ahead and then would finish any cake very nicely.






We then started on some more difficult wired flowers.  We made 'filler flowers' and buds, then fuschias.

Carnations were next.  Apparently the instructor doesnt like carnations, but I really loved them.  I'd love to design a cake with some enormous carnation type fantasy flowers dotting the front of it!

We then made some lily of the valley.  This was the instructors work, I thought they were so delicate and pretty, and actually not that hard to do, I hope to be making more of these in the future.  So cute!

This picture also shows some calla lilies.  They were nice and simple to do too.

We also made rose leaves and ivy.  I was disappointed that this was one of the last things we got started on, leaves are very important in the design of bouquets, so it was very frustrating that there wasn't much time for these because everyone got so caught up with their other projects.  If we'd been taught these early, we could have been working on these in any downtime we had.



This is the display that the instructor made,with a very pretty lily, which was one of the other flowers we worked on.

The other flower we made was, of course, a rose.  This is one of the most used flowers in cake design so it was good to have another try at it.  I didn't quite get mine perfect, but hopefully with a bit more work I can get the hang of them!

 This is one of my sprays of flowers, you can see I'd have been better off had I had some extra ivy to fill it out, and my coloring of my lily left a little to be desired, but its a good start!








My other spray had the prettier flowers, but 'lacked focus'.  You can see that my next project will need to be a flower arranging class!  It was amazing to see the sheer volume of flowers we managed to produce in 4 days!!

Previous classes I've taken leave you with two flowers over two days, so this was definitely more intense and productive!  PME designed this class to help people produce sugar flowers that were actually commercially viable, so they may not always be perfectly correct looking, but good enough for most people. 

The other downside with the PME classes is that the only equipment and supplies used are ones that PME sell, so they were either JEM, Wilton or PME.  Even if there was a better product, we werent able to use it.  This was particularly frustrating when making leaves as I'm used to using a grooved board to roll them out on, which leaves a groove for the wire to be put into.

I've taken a few pictures of other examples from the other students and instructors.  It was interesting to see the different color schemes. 

Every student on the class went away with something beautiful, so it was a testament to a great instructor that such a complex skill was so well taught. 

Having been to many classes with Jacqueline Butler at Petalsweet Cakes, and also a class with Tami Utley, I'd say this was much more intense, and the students were not there to have fun, they were there to learn.  Everyone seemed to be feeling the pressure, even though maybe half of us werent professionals.  I had to wonder about why they were taking time off work to do something that seemed to be stressing them out so much!

Overall this was a great experience.  I got experience of making a ton of different flowers.  I feel a lot more confident about trying new sugar flowers, and I already was asked to make some orchids for a cake that they were making at CAKE, so they already came in handy!  Here are the bright vibrant flowers they asked for!

Happy 90th Grandma!

l recently popped back home for a week so that I could celebrate my wonderful grandma's 90th birthday, along with all the family. It was so wonderful to spend a week with my mum, brother and niece and then end the week with a party with 35 others to celebrate grandma's 90th.

On all my recent trips abroad, I've had some kind of fragile sugar pieces in my luggage and this was no exception, I had a bright fuschia peony, which I was delighted to find made it all the way home in one piece with only one petal damaged.

We practiced all week singing 'Happy birthday great grandma' with Poppy, and she sang the loudest of everyone! Maybe partly because she had been patiently waiting for several days to eat the birthday cake!

The cake was a dense chocolate mud cake with a marscapone whipped cream and whipped milk chocolate mocha ganache, as I know grandma likes tiramisu, so I used that as inspiration. I was very honored when the event manager grabbed me to let me know that it was the best cake he'd ever had!!

After the candles were blown out, each of the grandchildren read out a verse of a fantastic ode that my cousin wrote.

When Violet Joyce Griffiths was born
her name caused a family storm
With a grandmother’s outburst,
Violet came first
But everyone knows “Joyce” is the norm

An education she set out to get
Being female was not a great bet
Evacuated to Wales, but hard work prevails
She got her degree and off she set

To Africa young Joyce did go
Researching nutrition and farming you know
Then back at home, in her field she became known
The title world expert they did bestow

She has always been an adventurer
Len wooed her out in the Gambia
In their caravan home, through Europe they roamed
With every passing year they grew happier

With three daughters the Doughty family starts
Her sense of adventure to us she imparts
Now four generations, there’s big celebrations
Her love of life is in all of our hearts

She retired then life really got going
Her interests and talents ever growing
Wood carving art, Scottish dancing apart
Too many to keep this verse flowing

For a better role model we couldn’t have dreamed
She’s broken barriers, she’s the feminist supreme
What it’s possible to achieve, if in yourself you believe
We’re so lucky to share her great genes

I wanted to say a big thank you to Jaqueline from Petalsweet Cakes, it was so wonderful to try using one of the peonies I learned to make with her. I'd encourage anyone to take a class with her, she is so serene and well organized, it is a very relaxing way to spend a couple of days.

Sugar Gardenias

I recently had the enormous pleasure of taking a one-on-one class with the immensely talented Jaqueline Butler of Petalsweet Cakes.

Of course I had a giant list of things to learn, but she knew what we could fit in and even that was very ambitious. We settled on some sugar gardenias. I love these flowers, so I couldnt wait to recreate them in sugar. I also wanted to make sure that it was a fairly quick flower that I had a chance of being able to replicate in a short enough time to be worth my while, and to be something that isnt easy to get fresh.

Jackie is extremely thorough, patient and well organised. She sets everything out carefully before starting and it was a good lesson to me to make sure I have plenty of room and try to work cleanly and neatly.

Of course they were a lot trickier than they look, but we slowly worked and I finished the class with a full flower, two smaller flowers, 3 lovely glossy leaves, and some buds. I also had a huge shopping list of things to buy!

I learned some very important techniques that I can apply to lots of other stuff, using the colors and lustre dusts, the laquer to get glossy leaves, and making and rolling out gumpaste and shaping petals for a realistic flower.

I'm sure Jackie would be more than happy to hear from anyone who would like to take her lessons, she's based in San Diego, so give her a shout if you'd like to learn from her! She also has a facebook page, its always lovely to see her creations.

Foray into Sugarwork with Orchids

I had the pleasure this weekend of meeting up with one of my cake classmates and going for a sugar class with the immensely talented and busy Tami Utley.

It was a lot more involved than I realised, and I was pretty exhausted by the end, but now that I look at the end product, I'm really happy with it and its great learning a new skill.

These flowers are made on wires, so they are not technically food safe and the wire shouldnt actually touch the cake, so one has to make sure it is placed in a plastic flower holder.

I hope someone wants me to make them a pretty flower cake soon as I'd love to practice my new skills!!

Tami does lots of different classes, at Do it with icing, and also privately, as well as on DVD. I'd love to hear from people as to how they've got on with DVD lessons as its not a medium I've tried.