Wilton Flowers and Cake Design - Class 2

The second lesson in the Wilton Flowers and Cake Design class was all about royal icing flowers. I'm an expert at making royal icing - two pound bag of powdered sugar, 6 T meringue powder and 10 T water, put in a stand mixer, walk away for 7-10 minutes. My kind of recipe!

In class, we were only supposed to make rose bases and rose centers, but our instructor taught us how to complete the rose so we have three solid weeks of practice making the Wilton Rose. My rose bases and rose centers leave a little something to be desired - they do not stand up as straight as the instructor's do, but I was able to finish the rose much better than the ribbon rose from Decorating Basics.

We also made apple blossoms (small flower) and primroses (larger flower with yellow star) with our decorating nail. Once I got the hang of the curving motion, these were a breeze to make.

I had the most difficulty with the rosebud - I'm left handed so have to create it essentially backwards and I couldn't wrap my head around it as easily as everything else I was doing. And then the sepals started looking like octopus legs until my instructor pointed out how to correct that.

Afterwards, I had a lot of royal icing flowers that I do not intend to use on my final cake, so I brought them to work on Valentine's Day and shared roses with people in my department and primroses with some of the attorneys. What a nice sugar rush to start the morning!