Sugar Hydrangeas

Sugar flowers are one of the prettiest things that you can create with your hands in order to add decor to a cake. In this lesson, I wanna share one of the most basic flowers that you can create that are quick, easy, and one of the really, really simple ways to add lots of color and texture to a cake without having to do a whole lot of work. Sugar blossoms are really cute, super simple, super easy. So to get started, you need some gum paste, a hydrangea cutter, and a hydrangea mold. This is just to add a little bit of texture.

And then of course we're gonna add... We're gonna utilize a rolling pin to roll it out, and I'll teach you a couple of little tricks to make sure that your gum paste doesn't dry out too fast. So your gum paste is one of those things that is a personal preference based on where you live. You wanna pick something that isn't gonna dry way too fast, not giving you enough time to work with the petals. And you also don't want something that's gonna take so long to dry that you don't have the opportunity to really have them hold their shape.

So what you wanna do is pick something for your environment that will work kind of perfectly. And you may have to play with a few brands in order to find that. Now, all I'm doing is rolling out my gum paste pretty thin. We wanna go to about maybe 1/16 of an inch. It's pretty paper-thin.

I am using a silicone mat here to keep my gum paste from sticking to the board, but if you need to, you could always put a tiny bit of cornstarch or powdered sugar underneath. If you're in a really humid environment, I recommend that you use cornstarch, just to kinda help that drying process. But if you're in a super dry environment, either pick a gum paste that has a little bit more drying time, a little bit more moisture to it, or just use powdered sugar underneath to prevent it from drying too fast. All right, so now that we have our gum paste rolled out, you can see that it's really quite thin. This isn't quite paper-thin.

It's a little thicker. You wanna give yourself a little extra room just to be able to thin the petals when we put it through our mold. So I have two different sizes here. I'm gonna go ahead and cut the large one first. So I always push down.

Just give a little jiggle, and that allows the gum paste to come away with the cutter. And then set that aside. I tend to work in pairs, but it's up to you. You could go through and cut all of this gum paste into the shape that you want right away. The problem with that is your edges may start to dry.

So I'm gonna leave this one sitting out, just so you can see what happens with that. And I'm gonna move this to underneath my silicone mat so that this becomes protected and isn't going to have a chance to dry out on me too quickly. If your gum paste starts to dry too fast, when you go to impress them with a mold or even thin petals, that actually creates some cracking on the edges. So always keep your gum paste covered. Once you have your flowers cut out, on most of the molds, they have a little notch where they will line up, just so you know kinda where they go.

And then you're gonna place your gum paste right on top of the mold. Flip the second one over on top, and just a little bit of pressure. You don't have to put all your weight here. It's just enough to create the indentations of the petal as if that flower is coming together beautifully with all of those little ridges. And then there's usually an area that you can kind of pick up.

If you can't, just squeeze the mold with your fingers, and it will release, and that flower comes right off. So the nice thing about the dual mold is that you get texture both on the bottom as well as the top. And as I said, having a gum paste that is a little bit quicker to dry, you can see I'm already holding a lot of that shape that's there. But if for any reason you have a softer gum paste, all you need to do is just use some of your equipment and just prop it up, and then within just a few minutes, that will actually start to dry, and I can remove the support from it, and it will actually hold its shape. So let's do this second one here.

Same process. And this one I'll set down so you can see. It definitely isn't holding its shape fully, but it's gonna keep a lot of those indentations. And the thing with blossoms is that you want a variety. So in this case, you can see I have a petal that is really sticking up quite a bit.

It's been propped, but this is fully dry. And then this one is one that was not propped and just laid flat. It's nice to have petals and blossoms that are not exactly the same every single time. In nature, while we do have a lot of similarities in our blossoms, they're never exactly the same. So you wanna try to create a variety in how your petals are laying.

Maybe the next time we only lift just one of those petals. So rather than sticking both of 'em up, we just have one up, and then the rest sort of lay flat. And this allows us to kind of piece these flowers together as we put them on our cake, to tuck underneath each other. One might overlap. Some of them might be very forward and have a really curved shape.

We can put some of the flatter ones underneath it. And it just creates a more uniform look and allows everything to kind of fit together well, kind of like a puzzle. Now, this one here has been sitting out for just a little bit, not long. And it may just be perfectly fine to go ahead and texture this one without any issue, but I wanna show you the drier it is, the tougher it is to get things that don't crack. So I don't know if you can see that or not, but right here there's a big crack, and that's because I've waited just a little too long with this particular gum paste, and it starts to crack.

Now, in the case of a hydrangea, that's completely fine. No edges are perfect. They're all going to have sort of slight tears and rips, and there might be some areas that are indented a little bit more than others. What you wanna try to avoid is pushing so hard that it actually rips. So let me show you that as well.

If I put too much pressure on this, you can already start to see that I am coming off of the edge of my mold, and so I sorta have an excess piece here. And you can do one of two things. In my case, I always try to save petals whenever I can because we've put a lot of work into this one already. I don't wanna waste it. So I'm just going to mend that petal a little bit.

In other cases where we actually have a hole starting to form, that petal might not be able to be saved. But don't throw it away yet. I'm gonna rip a little bit more and see if we can save it. And I'll show you. What I might do with this particular petal is actually roll it and curve it.

So now this petal is just taking on a slightly different shape and style than these other ones. Even though there was a hole and a tear, all is not lost here. We can always try to save some of our work and our time that we've put into it. There are occasions when an entire petal might break off. I'm gonna show you on these because even when they're fully dry, these have been drying overnight, they are very fragile still and can break off.

So this petal, while you would think that this whole flower is no good and you have to toss it, I always hang onto my little petals 'cause I always find that there's a purpose somewhere. We just have to figure out what that purpose actually is. And sometimes it's just to decorate as if it has an extra petal somewhere and you need to tuck things in. But the beauty with this particular flower is that we can still use it and just cover it up. And now you would never know that this petal has lost or this flower has lost a petal.

But when we're placing these on cakes, we can definitely mix and match and shape our flowers to cover any imperfections that we might have. So never toss a flower if it's broken. There's always somewhere that you can tuck it in and just get a little bit more use out of it. It might not be perfect, but it's okay. We don't have to be perfect in everything that we do on our cakes.

The last element that I wanna show you for this particular flower is just that it has a center. So in a hydrangea, first of all, we have four petals, and there's always a center inside of a flower. So that center tends to have the same amount of little pockets, I guess, little puffs that correlate with each of the petals. That's sort of how they open. That's just how a seed sort of grows into a pod, and then we've got four little sections that open up into petals, and then there are still four little sections on the inside.

So all you need to do for that is you can use either the same color of gum paste, or you can use a different color. I don't know if you can tell, but this is a darker blue, and this is a super light-colored blue. Hydrangeas come in a variety of shades, and especially just in one bunch there's usually a variety of colors. So the nice part about hydrangea is that you don't have to have perfect coloring, and you can always color your flowers as well. But I've taken a small piece of gum paste.

I am using my X-ACTO knife just to cut a small little circle. Usually what I do is once I find the right size, I just cut several, and then I roll all of them at once, just so that we don't want these to dry out by any means, but I also don't wanna start and stop my process many times. So I'm just rolling them in the palm of my hand to be somewhat circular. They don't even have to be perfectly round. Gonna tuck that one back under.

And then I'm gonna use the dry flower, not our fresh flower. And this is just a little bit of vodka, high proof. If you want, you can use just a small paintbrush right in the center. You're gonna drop one of those little dots right in the middle of that. And then as I was saying, the hydrangea has four petals, and its center also has four sections.

So you just want to use your X-ACTO and press down so that it creates four itty bitty little sections within that. And because this alcohol is super high proof, it will actually dry very fast as well. So we'll just let that one dry. The other way that I like to do it, just to be able to show you a second method, if the paintbrush is too big, you don't have a small enough paintbrush, that's okay. I just take a small piece of gum paste in my hand, and then I go to the alcohol.

So I just dip it. It just needs a little bit. And then I sorta tap it on the mat next to it to get off any excess. And then I'm gonna place that right inside. So now there isn't a whole lot of excess alcohol.

So you can see this one has quite a bit. It will dry, and it's not a problem. But if you wanna use these right away, you want that center to dry fairly quickly. So just a little dab. And then with the X-ACTO knife, you're just gonna pull those four sections in.

And then that tiny bit of alcohol that I used will actually do the trick to hold that in place. So that is a basic sugar blossom. They can be used as is. They can also have color added to them. You can see just within a few minutes, I was able to pull this away, and it stands right up.

So it depends on your gum paste. But you can also color the edges of these and add a whole lot more texture. We have an entire video that talks all about dusting your gum paste flowers, so I encourage you to check that out if you'd like to add more color to your hydrangea. But this is a basic sugar flower ready for cupcakes or cakes or however you'd like to create them.