Making Flowers without cutters - Tutorial And Gumpaste Recipe

What’s more beautiful than a flower on a Cake. From Weddings to Birthdays and even in your daily life, flowers can play a very important roll on making a day shine, on putting a smile on your face and creating a whole different environment around you and the people you love.

There are many ways to put flowers on any kind of desserts, as you saw in my last post, a cake with real fresh flowers can be beautiful and easy to decorate. But there’s other ways to create the effect by making them on your own.
From the royal icing with a piping bag, to other icings like buttercream and meringue.. Also I’ve seen there’s people thats works with rice paper on beautiful projects. But definitely the winner material for me it’s the Gumpaste, as you can create the most realistic pieces, thousands of possibilities and the storage and transport is not going to make you struggle at all.

Something that always worried me when I thought about starting to add flowers to my cakes was that in every tutorial you find around, they are using an infinity number of cutters and tools that I didn’t have at the beginning, as I only moved one year ago and many of my working tools I had to leave behind, so I’m basically starting over. In order to build a better business I also start acquiring many of these tools but there’s always going to be something missing, one of the first and more handy things I got is this basic fondant decoration set that has solved my life so many times!...

Of course, the tools are amazing, but looking a little bit with objective eyes, there’s many things you can create with a few basic stuff  and your own hands, without expending more money than the necessary and most important, having a lot of fun by creating beautiful things. That’s why I decided to create this First Gumpaste Flowers Tutorial to show you how easy can be to make these little filling flowers without any kind of cutters or weird tools.

The gumpaste can be bought or made by yourself, I like to make my own as I already tested a few brands and couldn’t get the desired texture very elastic and with a consistency that allows me to dry the flowers quickly and work with it with more freedom. The Gumpaste recipe I use, got to me through a friend of a friend, but I love to use it because it only need a few basic ingredients from the edible decoration shop and it will be made quicker than you think, the only very important step that you must follow every time is letting it rest overnight or at least a few hours if you are in a gumpaste emergency.

Something important to keep in mind is that these flowers normally are going to be the ‘cartoon’ version of a real flower, as I’m not the master of the Gumpaste flowers but I’m pretty happy with my results. When I realized this I took it seriously and started taking pictures of real flowers from every garden I found, that I could use as a reference to make mines look more realistic without adding more complications. Here I show you some…

Gumpaste Flower Tutorial - Flowers without cutters

Four Petals Filling Flower

I can’t believe how easy is this, just pay attention, my kitties also made their own to decorate cupcakes, so I’m sure you will be successful!

1.- We get a little ball of around 2 cm diameter. Here is your moment, you can make it bigger or smaller, depending on what size you want the flower.

2.- From that little ball, we are going to create a drop by pushing it against the palm of your hand in one side.

3.- Once you have a drop formed, you are going to take a sharp exact, a scissor or a little knife to cut the round part of the drop in half and then in a perpendicular way make another cut in half to get 4 segments.

4.- There are going to be your five petals, now pull the off the centre carefully and squish them a little bit in between your thumb and your index finger.

5.- The flower is taking shape, isn’t it exciting! Now, take the small ball tool and dip it in corn starch to softly draw circles on each petal from the outside to the inside until getting a concave shape in the petals.

6.- To give a touch of reality to the petals, we are going to use the leaf shaping tool or a toothpick to create a few veins on each petal. The best way is holding the flower on your hand with the petal you are going to shape laying on it, with the other hand holding the tool and create lines starting in the centre and going to the end of the petal. A few 3 veining per petal would be fine. To create a centre, just push the toothpick it into the centre softly.

7.- If you need it, take the ball tool again and shape only the borders of each petals.

This flower was inserted on a wire after these steps but you can leave it without wire if you want to use it in a cupcake for example.

The wire can be flower wire of 0,7/400mm which you made a little loop in the tip to hold to the dough better.

8.- Dip the loop into the edible glue and push it into the back of the flower carefully, when you have it in place, secure the bottom by twisting it in between your thumb and your index finger and squishing it a little bit against the wire.

Let the flowers rest hanging on a wine glass, ideal is a pasta dryer when you make many of them.

Gumpaste flowers can be made with colored or white gumpaste. On any way, it’s good to add some details of color once they dried, (which is going to be very fast with this gumpaste and if the weather is dry) to give a deeper dimension to the color. When I made these ones, I didn’t have any flower dust, so I combined wilton gel coloring with a few drops of alcohol to color the borders with a soft watery pink, some yellow for the pollen in the middle and a touch of green in the base of the flowers.

Gumpaste Recipe

Ingredients

4 Egg Whites

1 Kg Icing Sugar

2 tbsp. Vegetable Shortening

30 g of Tylose Powder

1 tbsp. Vinegar

Pinch of Salt

Procedure

Sift the sugar in a bowl and set aside.

In a stand mixer with the paddle attachment, whisk the eggs whites with the vinegar and the salt on a medium high speed until it starts getting foamy.

Add the sugar slowly leaving approximately one cup apart, keep whisking on a medium speed. if you are going to color it, this is the best moment.

Whisk one more minute and add the tylose powder, a dough is going to form.

Stop the mixer and drop the dough on a clean surface, put some shortening in your hands and knead it until the dough is unified. Add more sugar if necessary, the consistence have to be soft but not sticky.

Roll the gumpaste in a few layers of plastic foils and let rest overnight in the fridge.

Final Tips

• When working the gumpaste, use cornstarch to prevent it to stick in the work surfaces.

• Let it set to room temperature before using it, believe me, if you don’t want to kill your hands, don’t use it out of the fridge.

• Always keep it cover from the air currents, to prevent it from drying and get crumbs, only take out the amount you are going to use and cover it with a a piece of plastic foil when you are not using it.

• To storage your flowers, let them dry completely overnight or a few days depending on the weather. then place them in an airtight container in a dry dark place up to  months.

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