Transcript

Hi, I’m Susan Carberry, and I teach a course called Gravity Defined Garden Cake on CakeMate.com. Come on over and check it out. I’m going to be showing you this cake right here.

You’re going to be learning how to make and create a wooden barrel effect. You’re going to be doing a patinad pot, terra cotta pot, whimsical flowers, and also a lot about structure, how to actually build a cake like this and still have it standing when you get to your event. But in the meantime what you can do is check this video out, we’re going to be showing you how to do the little garden snail that you can use on many, many different kinds of cakes.

So down below here I have some lavender fondant, some purple fondant, and some white fondant. So I actually have some white that I just popped on top of the lavender here. This is going to be for the shell. So what I want to do is take part of this, I don’t need the whole thing, and roll it out into a cord. So I started with a ball, put my hands together this way, roll back and forth, place it down, roll it from the center out. You want it to be maybe about six inches long.And then what you want to do is roll it up.

So I’m just going to take it from the end here and just roll, roll, roll until you have the size that you like. I think that that’s actually a great size. So it’s like one, two, three rolls. So right here I’m going to take my palette knife, and I’m just going to cut it at an angle and slice that off. The reason I did it at an angle is so that it’ll actually sit flat now. That’s how it’s going to go like that. So you want to make sure that you do the shell first and then go on to the body.

So the purple is going to be the body. I’m going to take my hand, place it over the top, and roll. So notice that I’m rolling here and I’m not really touching the end. I want that to be a little bit thick and the rest to kind of taper off because that’s going to be the tail down here. That’s going to be the head. All right.

So then what I’ll do is I’ll bring this over. I want to make sure that I have a little piece of the pasta ready. I’m going to need scissors, and I will usually kind of bend the tail. What that does is it helps stabilize it. Let me take a tiny bit of water, place it right about in this area here, put the shell on top, kind of press down a little bit. Then what you do is you pull this up, put your finger here, and bend that forward. Okay, that’s his little head. Then you’re going to take scissors, and you’re going to come in and you’re going to cut more towards the lower portion of that piece of fondant. There’s the mouth.

Now to get this stay up because you can see it wants to flop down. What you do is go “open wide, buddy” and then you take pasta, and you go right down through the shell all the way until you hit the table. Now, I’ll slide it back slightly, snap it off, and then push it in all the way again so that you can’t see it, and then bend this forward. The end of the tail, I’m going to take this tool and just do some little lines on it like so. Maybe use this to kind of flatten that mouth area out a little bit, and then we’re going to do the eyes.

For the eyes I didn’t want them just to sit right on top of the head there, I wanted to make them a little bit different. So I’m actually going to have them sticking up a bit. For that you need to have two pieces, very small pieces, maybe about half inch pieces of pasta, and then a small ball of the purple fondant. You want to place the purple around the pasta and just kind of twist that around it. Most of the time it will stick. If it doesn’t, then you can actually put a tiny piece of shortening on the pasta for the fondant to stick to it. Let me put a little bit of water in there. There we go. One more. Hold on to his head, press that in. So those are going to hold up the eye sockets.

So now we have to do the eye sockets. We’re going to take two balls of the purple. So there’s one. I’m going to do them both here and attach them together. Another one here. Take the ball tool. So I’ve got a medium sized ball tool, press in, press in to make eye sockets. It’s sticky, so I put this in the cornstarch, and then I’ll press in one more time. And then two balls of white fondant, and then I going to need to pick these up. So I’m going to use my palette knife to pick those up. I’m going to take some water, place it right on the top here and here, and then place those right over the top and just press down slightly.

Then I’m going to take my gel color. I’ve got some brown gel color here, and I’m going to dip my brush in there and, let’s see, I’m going to have him going, kind of walking to the right. So maybe I’ll have his eyes over here on this side, and we’ll give him some eyebrows up here on the purple section. So press down, and then I’m going to curve this over on the other side. Press down a little bit thicker here and then curve it and taper off as you come around.

All right. There he is. Oh, missing his nostrils. Back with the FFM knife tool, press in there, and then he’s ready to go on to the cake. He’s going to go up here. So I’m going to take a piece of pasta and press that in so you can press that into the cake also. Then I’m going to go ahead and pick up the snail, and I’m going to place him right over the top of the pasta very gently. Let’s just turn his head this way so we can see him a little bit from the front.

So there’s our adorable little whimsical snail. Don’t you just love him. Don’t you want to learn more? Come on over and check out my course at CakeMate.com. Again, it’s called Gravity Defined Garden Cake.

Transcript

Hi I’m Liz Marek and I’m teaching a new cake course called Rustic Wedding Cakes on Cake Made. It’s going to awesome. I’m going to show you how to make this beautiful rustic birch log cakes super-hot design. I’m going to show you how to make the cake board, stack the cake, decorate all the tiers. We’re going to be making wafer paper flowers. We’re going to be making owl toppers. It’s going to be awesome. I’m also going to show you how to make a really trendy cake called, The Chalkboard Cake design. You definitely want to see that one. But first, I want to show you how to make fresh flowers, food safe. This is a big deal when you’re making a cake with fresh flowers. You want to prepare them in a very special way so that nobody has to worry about any sort of chemicals or yuckiness inside their cake. To prepare your rose, we’re going to peel off the extra leaves, break it off or you can cut it. I think I’m just going to insert this right on the side so it looks like it’s peeking out from between the two tiers. And I want to include a little bit of foliage, so I’m going to take a couple of our leaves and I’m just hold that together at the base. And we’re going to take a little bit of our floral tape, give it a stretch and just wrap that around the base of your leaves. And that just to hold the leaves together at this point. And then we’re going to put our flower. It’s like you’re kind of creating a very large buttoner. And they we’re going to take another piece of floral tape, give it a stretch, and wrap that around until you cover up the ends of the flowers completely. If you need another piece of floral tape, by all means, you can use another one and layer it up. Just make sure that the bottom of the flowers are completely covered. And what that does is, that actually just stops any sort of water that is inside the flower from leaking out. And that does two things, it keeps the flower fresher for longer and it also keeps any of that water from getting into your cake which could have pesticides in it. It could have any kind of chemicals, stuff you don’t really want to be eating, but it’s important to keep the flower nice and fresh.

So now it’s time to insert our floral arrangement into our bubble tea straw. Just guage about how long you need it to be. You want to have a good, one inch, past the end of your stem just so there’s no chance of that digging into your cake and cut that off. And you can see why we need to use the bigger bubble tea straw, so you have enough space for all of this floral. Stick that in there and then I’m just going to place this right in here. Making sure I don’t squish my cake. I’m going to use my scissors to sort of reach in here and push it down a little bit further. You could also use wire cutters or pliers or something like that, if you need to reach in there. So now, I’m going to put in a few other little flowers and filler leaves and things like that to fill out this bottom space. Whenever you’re creating a floral arrangement, you want to think about your symmetry and you don’t want to overwhelm your cake design with flowers, But you usually use one or two flowers, maybe three, if you have enough space. Usually, in this kind of design, you want to go with uneven numbers because we’re not really going for super symmetrical. Break off this flower. It’d be really cool to be cutting into your wedding cake and you can smell beautiful roses and vanilla. It’s pulling all the way around. Another piece of floral tape. Whenever you’re creating these floral design, be sure you always have something to use as filler. If you just have big fat flowers, you’re going to end up having these holes that you can’t really fill and that can really create a problem in your design. So make sure you have some leaves or some other little tiny flower buds and things like that to use as part of the design. Let’s put that right in here. Push that way down in there.

So as you can see, making our fresh flowers food safe is not too difficult at all. It’s just mostly using your floral tape to wrap everything together and then using some bubble tea straws to insert them into the cake. I doesn’t take much time and all and looks really great. Okay, so I filled in all of our little crevices and holes with foliage and other little flowers so that you don’t have any sort of visuals of the support structures. So that’s basically what we were doing with all the filler flowers. I’ve got my final arraignment ready to go and I’m just going to place that right on the top. Just like that and I’ll push that into there. So, as you can see, making your fresh flowers food safe is super easy and a really important step in making your rustic wedding cake. If you want to learn how to make this beautiful birch wedding cake, please go checkout my rustic wedding cake class on Cake Made right now. You’re going to love it. You’re going to just blow people away and enjoy every second of it.

Dawn: Hi, I’m Dawn Perrin, a certified pastry chef and master sugar artist. I teach the royal icing piping, stenciling, and filigree course on cakemade.com. In this course I teach many of the techniques that I used to own me a first place at the Oklahoma Sugar Art Show in 2013. Check it out if you want to have an in-depth look on how to make 3D filigree, stenciling a cake, brush embroidery, and much more. In this video I’m going to teach you how to make a royal icing monogram. If you’d like to take this a step further come join me at cakemade.com and I’m going to teach you how to take that monogram, make a topper, and place it on a beautiful royal icing paneled cake.

We’re going to go ahead and start the actual letter. I like the script or italic letters. If you’re not comfortable hand drawing them you can find stencils like these at your local craft store. I’ve got an L and the reason I’ve just done the L is I love the shape of the L. We’re doing all our outlines first then we’re going to fill it in with just a little bit of filigree in the center to give it a bit of strength. I’m going to use a tip 2 because this is going to be something that again, you’re going to handle. It’s going to be fairly tall and delicate. So use a slightly heavier tip so you’re not panicking when you pick it up.

I’m going to start on the corner. I’m just going to follow the one line. Again if you don’t hit exactly the pencil mark don’t worry, you’re the only person who knows it unless it’s really off and it doesn’t look like your letter anymore. If it’s a little bigger that’s fine. It will just show bigger on top. I find when I put my arms on the table I have to pull them off sometimes. It’s actually smoother if you don’t rest your arms anywhere. Good, so there’s the basic form of the L and we’re going to add on those little parts now that are going to give us room to put some filigree work.

I’m going to start in this little joint up here on the inside, let it fall, a little wider around the center and get in there over down by the tip. Lowering my pressure so it’s nice and neat. Always think about that neatness. The part where I started go through with a brush. Fix it so it’s one piece so we don’t have an extra line. Okay, I’m going to start on the center here, again. Add some icing, let it rest and stop the pressure just as you’re getting out to the first layer of icing. Always make sure those start and stop points are nice and clean. They should like they’re almost one seamless piece.

I got two little sections I want to add in last over here on the turn and ending off almost where that last one met up with the original outline and one on the bottom. I’m going to make this bottom part just a little bit wider. Not quite as big as some of the areas but just a little piece. That will give us some added strength when we go to put it on our actual build up piece.

Okay, so let’s take this out of your way and you can see we got a basic L. What I want to do now is fill the inside of the L with just a little bit of S’s and C’s so that the whole piece comes together. So again just some random, do an S, C, there’s no right or wrong here you’re just trying to fill it in. This is going to give you some of that added strength when you go to pick it up so the more you can fit in there, the stronger that panels going to be. I’m going to go ahead and put some of these in the oven just to get them dry a little bit faster with the light bulb. Don’t turn your temperatures on just your light bulb. That’s enough heat to help this move on.

Okay, I pretty much filled in all the open areas. Now I’m going to start, you can pick anywhere, I’m going to start up on this edge and I’m going to pipe those little bead borders and do just little bead borders all around. Essentially we’re doing it for two reasons, we’re going to make it stronger again but we’re going to create a little bit of texture on top. These borders we’re going to put gold so they’re going to have that extra little touch on the top. I’m going to quickly move the stencils out of the way so I have more access to my pattern. If you don’t want to put them in the oven you can go ahead and let them sit and dry. And you can start if you want to start on the bottom and come to the top or start in the middle. I generally do almost the whole outside line and fill it in, kind of like I did when I piped that actual outside and just follow the shape of the L. We’re at that last little section of the L now. Maybe three more. There we go.

This is your piped filigree L. We’re going to let it sit and dry for a little. Now that our L’s had time to dry we’re going to very carefully pull the plastic back, pick up the L, but this time we need to put our letter back over on it’s other side and pipe the border on the opposite side. We’re doing it for two reasons. We want to have the front and the back the same but I also want to make it a little bit stronger because this is going to be a difficult item to pick up. Especially first time around. Straight down, hand underneath nice and flat so you can catch that released piece. Really gently you’re going to take it, easiest way is to hold it in your two hands and flip it over and we’re going to place it down. This little piece came off. We’re going to attach that back on. The thin pieces sometimes will move but when we border it that’s going to pick it right back up. Just place your little curl where it belongs.

We’re going to border that across. Don’t panic yet, it’s just sugar. The first thing I want to do is I want to put a little icing where that can separate and touch it up. Now that borders going to make it so much stronger again. So don’t worry. Okay that’s it. We’re going to do that same V border following all the way around the L. You’ll see this makes it quite a bit thicker, a lot easier for you to handle and pick it up. I’m going to put some little I missed this little point right there. Now we piped all around that. I’m going to let that set and rest for a little bit. Again we want it to set so that we can paint the gold on there and put that accent so the L’s going to pop off the topper.

That’s how you make a royal icing filigree monogram. For an in-depth instruction on how to take this to into a three dimensional monogram topper and many other royal icing elements, check out my course on piping, stenciling, and filigree at cakemade.com.

Transcript

Hi, I’m Bronwen Weber of Frosted Art Bakery, and I’m teaching a course “Contemporary Wedding Cakes with Classic Piping Techniques”. In this course, you’ll learn to make a silver plateau out of chocolate, you’ll learn to ice cakes quickly and easily, you’ll learn to make really fast gum paste flowers, and do a lot of different piping techniques.

But today, I want to talk to you about something that I get a lot of questions about: how to price cakes. It’s a very tricky one. Most people, right off the bat, forget to account for their time and the time that it takes to decorate a cake. Cake takes so much time, and you have to remember the time that it takes talking to the client about the cake. You’ve got to remember all the time that it takes you to go buy your ingredients and hunt down that special tool you need or find that silicon mold. All that time needs to be accounted for, and your client needs to pay for that. You don’t. That is the time that you’re giving them and allotting to them. So labor is your biggest expense, and you have to account for it. You are worth a whole lot. Your time is worth just as much as my time, as anybody’s time, so do not forget to charge for your time.

If you had to make a guess as to percentage-wise, I would say that your food cost should be about 15% or so, 15%. So if you think about what you’re charging now for your cakes, if your food cost is more than 15%, you might want to think about that. If you’re thinking, “Oh, well, this has about eight pounds of butter and that costs $50, so I need to charge $75 for this.” Then you got to think again because you’ve got to get that food cost lower. Your labor is worth a whole lot more than butter is. Just think of your time with the cakes as time away from your family and from your friends. So you need to account for that time, and your client should be paying for that. Your family shouldn’t be.

A lot of bakeries sell their cakes per serving, and that’s how we do it because it’s an easy thing for clients to understand, “Oh, how much per serving?” So one thing that you should get in line is: How big is your serving? Get a standardized serving chart, and really stick to it so that you can charge accordingly. Another thing to consider is geography. If you’re in New York City or Los Angeles and the amount per serving is some standard price, your price should probably fall in line with that. Yours shouldn’t be a third of it because then you’re just making a third of the money everyone else is. That seems silly.

A lot of people say to me that clients in their area won’t pay this certain amount of money for these cakes. Well, they certainly won’t pay for that if you give them that same cake for half the price. If you charge half the price today, you’ll never get three times the price in the future. You need to commit to a price and wait for the clients to catch up. They’ll get there. I promise. If they want good quality cake from a good quality cake decorator, they will pay the price. And just remember, when you’re buying a piece of art, like a painting, it’s not the paint and the canvas that you’re paying for. It’s the artist’s time and his schooling and his techniques and his skill. And that’s what they’re paying for, too, when they’re buying a cake from you.

So those are things you need to consider when setting prices for your cakes. To learn how to make a cake like this with everything you see here, cake, icing, modeling chocolate, and piping, please check out my online course “Contemporary Wedding Cakes with Classic Piping Techniques”. I really hope to see you there.

Transcript

Hi! My name is Bronwyn Webber and I’m from Frosted Art Bakery in Dallas, Texas. I am teaching this online course for this three tier wedding cake on this chocolate silver plateau. Did you know that’s chocolate? It’s not silver. So in this course, you get to learn all kinds of piping techniques, a couple of really fast easy quick flowers and of course, how to make this plateau. But today, I’m going to show you a couple of neat things that you can do with the 104 tip. So, I hope you enjoy this little video and don’t forget to check out this course and see all the things that you’ll learn in it. I hope to see you there.

So I’m going to show you a couple of quick side designs you can use with the rose tip, also known as the ribbon tip or the 104 tip. It comes in 101, which a very small one, 102, 103 and 104, which is what we’re going to use today. There’s a couple of different variations in the brands. This one is an Attico tip and so it’s much thinner than the Wilton tip. I prefer the Attico tips but it is up to you and I’ll show you the difference for sure. So what you want to do is have a bag of icing, any color, any color. Pink’s my favorite. Put the tip on the end and there’s a fat end and a skinny end. So the first ruffle that I’m going to show you is actually a vertical ruffle, which is kind of fun. So you’re going to hold the fat end to the cake. So keep you fat end near the cake, all right? Let’s do it! So what we’re going to do is just a back and forth movement, really quickly and end at the bottom. And then you keep going a couple – and here we go again. And so you can see this will make a really neat effect if you do it over and over all the way around the cake. A really quick way to decorate a cake really quickly. It almost looks like an optical illusion. It’s pretty cool! And so to finish it off, you would definitely want to put a border on the bottom or raise this up and not put it on the border yet and then you can put the cake down as well. So that’s really fun but what happens if you do that same thing and squeeze really hard? I’ll show you. So I’m not even going to wiggle. I’m going to have the icing do all the work for me. Look at that. So I’m just going to squeeze really hard. It does it for me. Amazing! So that’s a neat ruffle trip and you can do that this way or this way as well.

Now here we go for ruffle cakes. You see a lot of them nowadays. You can do them starting at the top and so what I’m going to do is now I’m going to do ruffles this way. So I’m going to start at the top and just kind of squeeze a little bit. Go down a little bit more, squeeze and of course you would do this around the whole cake. So you can see this popular design all over but normally, it’s done with fondant but this is a way to do it with buttercream so that you don’t have to have that much of a commitment to fondant because that’s a lot of fondant when you’re making one of those ruffle cakes and a lot of time. So you want to squeeze and kind of randomly, you want to let the ruffles go where they lay, free and easy ruffles. So there you have it, lot of different kind of ruffles. Now, if you want to have it more controlled, what you can do is an up and down motion with that tip and we can start from the bottom this time. So keep the fat end towards the cake and you can give it an up and down motion like this and then right above that, you do the same thing. Up and down and then above that, same thing. So this is several different ruffles that you can do with the 104 tip.

You can see it would be really pretty if you did variations in the color but there you have one ruffle, two ruffle, three ruffle, four ruffle before you could even cover a cake in fondant. It’s pretty quick. Also what you can do with the ribbon tip is you can use it to make ribbons so if you were going to do a top border, you can go around your cake like this and add a ribbon. You could do that again and again and again and complete this ruffle look all the way on the top. And then of course, you can do swags with this tip, which is probably the classic thing to do with it so keep the fat end towards the cake, skinny end towards you, go down and then release the pressure as you come up. Down, release the pressure as you come up. Down and release the pressure as you come up. So there you have it – several things you can do with the humble 104 tip. To learn how to make a cake like this with everything you see here, cake, icing, modeling chocolate, and piping – please check out my online course: contemporary wedding cake with classic piping techniques. I really hope to see you there.

Transcript

Amy: Hi, I’m Amy Noel, owner of Sugar Flower Cake Shop in New York City. I teach the online course, “Modern Elegant Sugar Flowers,” where I show cake decorators how to create beautiful sugar flowers that are featured on wedding and other specialty cakes. It’s an extended version of a class that I’ve taught in Martha Stewart’s test kitchen. If you’re serious about making sugar flowers that look like the real thing you want to check out my online course. In this video I’ll show you how to make sugar berries for your sugar flower arrangements. In order to make brunia berries, I need a teeny tiny little bit of gum paste. I just have a little bit.

When you’re making berries, we’re going to be making a collection of just little balls of gum paste on a wire. Now the wire though, I’ve bent over the top of my wire so it looks like the eye of a needle. That’s going to make sure that the gum paste sticks. When I go to make my berry I want a tiny bit of gum paste. I’d say that most beginner sugar flower makers tend to use too much gum paste, so take what you have and probably split it in half, and that will be maybe the right size. If you need to you can always just pinch off even a little bit more. I’m rolling that in my hand just around to make a nice smooth ball. Dip the hooked end of my wire into my edible glue and brush off the extra on the back of my hand. I like to hold my little berry in my hand. I try not to hold it between my fingers. I find that if I hold it between my fingers my berry just gets squished, but if I hold it in my hand I can just insert the wire carefully into the berry. I want to push the wire in far enough so that the hook part starts to disappear but not so far that it starts to pop out on the other side.

From there I can just pinch the hole closed that I made with the wire and just make sure that I come back to a nice round shape. Pinching and pushing and pressing just a little bit, round and round and round, and that will make a nice round shape. Each of my berries is going to have to dry overnight before I can add the pollen on the outside. With the first day that I’m working on berries I’ll do a whole bunch of these, we might even do a 100 at a time. Since these need to dry overnight on my first day of making berries I’ll make a whole bunch of different berries. As you’re making your berries you really want to vary the size of your berries. I think it makes your spray look a bit more realistic.

Some of them might be a little bit bigger and also make sure to make a couple of teeny tiny ones. Almost like they’re little tiny buds but just take a look and make sure you have a variety of sizes so that your arrangements look more realistic. There I’ve made six berries and this remember would be just enough for one spray, but these are going to need to dry overnight before we go to put our pollen on top. I’m just going to move this out of my way until I want to mix up my pollen. Now when I go to mix my pollen I’m calling it pollen, but it’s really not pollen it’s just sugar. I’m using a natural cane sugar but you can use a white sugar or whatever kind of sugar you have. I’m going to add a little bit of petal dust to my sugar to get the color that I want.

Brunia berries have a little bit of a gray tone and they’re also, I think, a little bit sparkly so I have some super pearl and also some charcoal petal dust. I’m just going to add a little bit of that into my sugar and just mix it up. This part is going to make it a little bit more gray with the charcoal and then by adding the super pearl it’s going to make it a little sparkly as well. You can decide how much or how little you want. You’ll just mix it up and you’ll see what the color looks like. I think I’m going to make mine a little bit more gray so add just a little more charcoal petal dust. I think that will work. Now these berries on my left have dried overnight and they’re now rock hard, you can hear that. I’m going to take my berry and dip it into, completely submerge it, into my edible glue. That means I’m going to get the whole entire thing wet. Even maybe a little bit of the top of the wire.

You want to roll it around. I roll the piece through between my fingers, roll the wire between my fingers to make sure that all of the piece is completely covered. Then I have one of my brunia berries. I’m going to repeat that with all of the different berries. This is such a super easy process. If you wanted to instead of making a brunia berry you could make mimosa just by coloring the sugar yellow instead of a silvery gray. Or you could fancy with all sorts of different colors. There are many many different berries that you’ll find and a lot of them have these little, they look like pollen or seed on the outside. That’s really the look that we’re going for here. I put my pollen on my last berry and I want to then arrange it in sprays. I’m going to grab some green floral tape and when I’m making a spray of berries, I like to put six berries to a spray. You can make your sprays as full or as sparse as you want, but I really like when there’s six different pieces.

I’m just going to group them into a cluster and grab my floral tape and just wrap it around the base of the wires. I don’t want to go up too high because I want to have the flexibility to be able to open the spray when I have but I just fold it over a little tab to make sure that my floral tape can stick to itself. It really only sticks to itself. It doesn’t stick to anything else. Then I just spin the wires in my hand and I’m just wrapping around the base of the wire kind of like a barbers pole, just spinning and pushing. You’ll notice some of the sugar may fall off, that’s totally okay. The rest of the color will stick to the pieces. When I get to the bottom I can just pinch off the rest of the tape. This will give me one insertion point into my cake. What I can do to make this look more like a little spray is to just bend out the wires.

You can decide how close or how far away you want your spray. I like to give a little bit of space in between. Usually I’ll have one in the middle and then the other five kind of around the outside. You can decide how intricate you want to get with the bending of your wires. That’s how you make sugar berries. For a complete course on how to make sugar flowers like a pro, including professional cake decorator secrets for arranging them on a cake, please check out my online course, “Modern Elegant Sugar Flowers.”

Transcript

Amy: Hi, I’m Amy Noel and I’m the owner of Sugar Flower Cake Shop in New York City. I teach the online cake decorating course, “Modern Elegant Sugar Flowers.” It’s an extended version of a class I taught in Martha Stewart’s test kitchen. In this course I teach you how to create succulent Juliet roses and peonies from sugar. Plus I teach you how to arrange them on a three-tier cake, in a basket cake, and also on a mini cake. If you’re interested in perfecting your sugar flower making skills you should check that out. In this free video I’ll show you how to use one of the most common sugar flower making tools, the ball tool. A lot of beginning sugar flower makers tend to use this tool incorrectly. I’ll show you some tips and tricks for how to use it to make beautiful sugar flowers.

Let’s get started. Sugar artists use a ball tool in order to thin out the edges of their petals. It’s so that they can create realistic looking sugar flowers. When I’m thinning out the edges of my petals I use a technique in order to thin out the edges of my petals first. The technique that I use is as if I’m snapping. I’m going to pinch and roll my thumb and my first finger around the edge of my petal. This is going to thin it out so later when I use my ball tool it will be a lot easier. If I find that my fingertips are sticking to my petal I can always add a little bit of powder sugar to prevent myself from sticking.

Now, when you’re working with a ball tool one of the things we try to do with the ball tool is to create some ruffle patterns. You could just use your ball tool to just thin out your edges of your petals. Or you can use it to make your petal really really ruffled. Let me show you how you get each of those different petals and how to achieve them. A lot of beginner sugar artists sometimes think that you achieve all of this ruffling by stabbing their petal. You don’t want to work in an up and down motion. That won’t achieve all of this ruffling. Sometimes they think that you want to twist your ball tool as your working. That won’t work either. What you really want to focus on is holding your ball tool so that the center of your ball is right in line with the edge of the petal.

From there you can just trace around the outer edge of your petal. Just push down. If you push down all off of a sudden the petal will start to pop up and create some ruffles. That will thin out the edge. If we want a flower that’s really really ruffled, like our sugar peony, we can really really press down and push and I’m making small back and forth little tiny motions in order to get all of that throughout. Let me show you that again. I’m just going to push down, I press harder than I think I need to, and I’m just going back and forth, back and forth, all the way around the edge of my petal.

Now, holding my ball tool like a pencil I’m just pressing down. I’m not stabbing them. I’ve not lifted my ball tool from my foam mat at all. I’m just pushing down, pushing down, and that will create all of the ruffles that we need. Just a back and forth motion. If though we were making a different kind of flower and creating something that didn’t have as much ruffling, we could do that same snapping motion to tuck our edges and then we can use our ball tool just to thin out the edges of our petals, because some flowers just aren’t as ruffled as others. We just want something nice and thin.

When I’m working on a larger piece, a larger set of petals, I usually like to switch to a larger ball tool. Typically the size of the ball tool will determine how much ruffling there will be. When I’m working with a larger ball tool I won’t get as much ruffling as I will with one of my smaller ones, but the same principles apply where I want to line up the center of my ball tool with the edge of my petal. And I’m just working around the edge of the petal. I have larger petals, I might need to move some of the petals out of my way in order to reach them. I’m just pressing down, then I can just go back and forth in the center of the petal just to thin it out, just a little bit more. When I want to just thin the petal edge I just go back and forth and have a long motion. I don’t want to do all those back and forth like with the smaller ball tool when I don’t want it frilled but I can just gently across the petal create and thin it out just a little bit.

Just remember when you’re working with your ball tool to thin out your edges. You’re not going to stab your sugar flower. You’re not going to twist your arm, you just want a general back and forth motion and you can decide whether it’s short little strokes to make something ruffly or long sweeping strokes just to thin out the petal edge. That’s how you properly use a ball tool. For a soup to nuts course on how to make sugar flowers, berries, and leaves plus how to arrange them on different cakes please check out my online course, Modern Elegant Sugar Flowers.

Transcript

Hi! I’m Amanda Oakleaf of Oakleaf Cakes. Thanks for clicking on this free video. I want to show you a good alternative to using traditional wooden dowels. I really like to use bubble tea straws. They’re really quick and easy and it makes the cake nice and clean and it stacks together really nice. It’s all going to be a part of a bigger video series that I’m teaching on how to make a sculpted hamburger cake. And we’re going to show you how to creme coat, and stack and carve a sculpted hamburger with a couple patties as well as make a bunch of fondant vegetables: onions, lettuce, tomato. We’ve also carved the buns, put some seeds on top and then finished it off with a pickle wedge on the bottom in addition to some fondant potato chips. So I’m just marking out where they go, right on the lettuce. And once it’s all marked, the straws are really nice compared to wooden dowels. If you were using wooden dowels, you had to put the dowel in, make a mark, pull the dowel out and then use a really sharp knife or small saw to cut it to length. With the straws, all you have to do is push all the way down. Make sure it goes to the base and then just snip it off right at the surface of the cake. I’m just going to do one right in the center, that way it’s easier to line everything up so I’m going to start with the highest point and maybe even try to lower the height of these veggies just a little bit. You don’t want to squish the cake too much but that will get everything else to be closer to the same height. So you just want to kind of work your way, from the first straw, go directly across, cut the next straw. From that straw, go straight across and so on. And the offset scissor really allows the action of the scissor, the pinching, not to catch the cake that’s lifted up. So right now, I’m eyeballing the height. We can go back and check it later with a flat surface. I just want to get everything cut down to start with. So good way to check that all of the straws are cut nice and level is to use our fondant smoother. It’s a nice flat surface. I just put them on from the middle straw to the outside straw and kind of get down and look at it. Make sure it’s nice and level and you would notice if one straw was pushing up the fondant smoother too high. You can spin it, make sure everything’s level with the center one. That one definitely feels a little bit too tall. See how it hits the side? So we can just trim that off just a little bit. You want to make sure if you’re cutting just a little piece of the straw, that you know where it goes so it doesn’t land in any food. Just throw that away. Keep going. And I actually noticed that the middle straw is taller than this one so then I need to cut the middle straw down. Everything should be at the same height. And then this one’s a little bit tall. You can kind of see how the fondant smoother goes down in a little bit. I think that we’re pretty good, though. Maybe that one’s a little high. I just like to put a little bit of royal icing on each straw. And royal icing acts as a good glue to hold the cardboard to the fondant and hold the cake all together. And you don’t want a ton of royal icing because you don’t want to really see it in the finished cake, just enough to get the cardboard to stick. So now that we have all of the royal icing in place, we can go ahead and put on the final top bun. You just want to look for the front, pick your best side, keep track of the front of the cake. And this would be a good time to hide any of the imperfections of the bun. We can do that with the lettuce. If you had any cardboard showing, we can put that in the back. I saved the last piece of lettuce that I can use to hide anything that I feel is necessary. So just give it a spin to make sure everything’s covered up. So you can see from the front, I have a little bit of the straw showing and I can definitely use some of my lettuce to just glue right in there and cover it with the straw so that doesn’t show. And I’ll probably cut it in half so I can use the other piece over here where I have a straw showing. So you can just – a little more glue and maybe it’s folded up a little bit just to fill the space, okay? And there’s one more on this side. All right, so as you can see, the straws are really effective at holding the weight of a really big sculpted cake so I encourage you to sign up for the hamburger cake course. You’ll learn so much more and how to make this cake.

Transcript

Hi! I’m Amanda Oakleaf of Oakleaf Cakes. Thanks for clicking on this free video. I’m going to show you how to make a pickle wedge look really realistic out of fondant. It’s all going to be a part of a bigger video series that I’m teaching on how to make a sculpted hamburger cake. I’m going to show you how to creme coat, and stack and carve a sculpted hamburger with a couple patties as well as make a bunch of fondant vegetables, onions, lettuce, tomato. We’ve also carved the buns, put some seeds on top and then finish it off with a pickle wedge on the bottom in addition to some fondant potato chips. For the pickle wedge, you can really just do fondant. So I’m just going to knead that where the color is to where I want it. I want this nice light color to be the main focus of the pickle. So what we want to do is form it into a log, just by rolling it or rolling it on the table. So we want to keep the outside edge, which can be this because that’s going to be covered up by the skin, nice and round and cut at an angle. So that’s one edge and so we want to cut in the other direction, putting the flat edge on the table. So now we just have a rough cut edge. I want to keep this back nice and rounded and form the pickle because you want those two flat edges to be nice and flat. And what we need to do now is cover the outside in a very thin layer of the dark green and that will be like the skin on the outside of the pickle. And to rule out fondant on the table, you just want a little bit of corn starch both on the bottom, a little bit at the top as well. That way it doesn’t stick to your rolling pin. So you want to keep moving this around just so it doesn’t stick to the surface. If it sticks, you have to start over so it’s good to just keep moving it around. And this is way longer than I need. I’m just making sure I have the right thinness. Pretty thin so I’m just going to cut off more than I need to work with. So, we want to measure the length of this – not curled, because that won’t be the full length. We want to lie it out flat and just take a pizza cutter and then I’ll cut one edge and glue it and then I’ll cut the other edge afterwards. That way I’m sure it’s going to cover the back. If you have corn starch on the back, you just want to flip it over – that way when you put your pickle on here, you can flip it over this way, you have your nice, clean edge showing for when it’s finished. And we need to glue it on so we’re going to use our meringue powder glue. It’s just a mixture of meringue powder and water. So you can put that on a brush. If you use too much glue, it’ll just start to dissolve the fondant and it will be really a big sticky mess so just enough to get it tacky is all and put that right in the center. And I’m lining it up with this edge and then I’ll go ahead and cut the other edge after the fact, okay? We’ll need a little bit more glue on this end of it. So that’s our pickle and I want to cut off all this extra. You don’t want to cut it too short so just run it right along the wedge and it should just line up exactly. And if there’s a little bit of extra fondant there, just a little bit more glue and then, need some glue on the ends here. And this, we want to cut more to a point so as long as it’s long enough, just cut off square edges. The same thing on the other side. And the last thing I would do to this is add some seeds. I can do that in the same color as the flesh of the pickle. And the seeds are really just little bits of fondant, take off a little tiny pea sized amount and then roll into more of a tear drop shape and then we’ll just press that onto the pickle after we get a few of them made. So I roll it into a ball and then just taper the edge. That way you get a tear drop shape. I want them to go the entire length of the pickle wedge. So I have enough seeds to cover the length of my pickle so I’ll just go ahead and glue them on. And you can just put a little dab of glue – you don’t want too much because it will dry shiny if you get glue everywhere. Press them on and then you can just flatten them out, leave a little bit of space, do the next one. And that;s the last one, so you can call it done. If you want to, you can add a bit more texture, kind of like some more ribbing texture on the back of the pickle just to give some cucumber pickley ridges. And then if you want to, just to flatten out the seeds a little bit more, just press it right there on the table, that will make everything nice and flat. And then just make sure you let it dry in the curved shape that you want. As you can see, that was really easy to make a fondant pickle. It’ll look really nice next to our hamburger cake so I encourage you to enroll in the hamburger cake course and I hope to see you there.