Sugarpaste Crazy

It's past 1 am and I can't sleep! I've been making sugarpaste (fondant) roses all night and just not getting them right. The first practice rose I made was a mixture of the techniques I learnt from a sugarpaste course when Wey was a toddler and from You Tube videos. I was pretty happy with the result, considering that the last time I made roses for a wedding cake was more than a decade ago, and proceeded to the second rose, sticking to what my teacher had taught: roses come in odd petals of 3, 5, 7 and so on. By the time I got to the 3rd row of 7 petals my rose looked like a pink cabbage. No good. I decided reluctantly to forget about rules.


The first rose.



The second rose: a pink cabbage.


Third rose, petals too thick.

The third rose looked better but still didn't look right. I plugged in Hub's laptop on the dining table and spent the next  1/2 hour ogling at Zurin's vintage roses, looking so real and beautiful that it's hard to believe they are made of sugar. They look too difficult and intimidating for me. I will have to fly to KL one day to learn how to make roses from Zurin. I spent another 1/2 hour at Cupcake Dlights, my top cupcakes and sugarpaste cakes blog crush. Zahirah's only in her late 20s and already made a big name with her creations. My sugarpaste teacher was trained in Australia, a world leader in sugarpaste work, and she mentioned South Africa as being one of the world's best in sugarpaste art and Zahirah is in Durban, South Africa. If you go to her blog, click on any photo and that will take you to her Flickr account which is filled with the most amazing cakes. I am just  AWED by her skills and her classy designs. Her work is so elegant and classy, I've not seen any gaudy designs, not one. Even her colors are incomparable. I think she mixes them and I don't think it's Wilton colors. If only she gives some tutorials on her blog. Her work is so amazing and breathtaking that going through them I felt like I was in a different world, a wonderland of roses, fairy tale characters and all things nice. My major crush for photography is Norjlus for travel and outdoor photos (another fairy tale world), Stone Soup for her to-die-for food photo skills (I absolutely adore her photos!) and Cupcakes Dlight for the world's most gorgeous gorgeous cakes and lately  photography too.


Inspired by CupcakeDlight, I made a simple violet pink rose that looks more like a gardenia.

I'm not as worried as I should be about this assignment because I have enlisted two of the best people for the job--A, who said she first learnt sugarcraft from  my blog only 9 months ago but now is so good at it (her cakes are awesome!) that I look up to her as my teacher and E, who's an excellent cook and expert at handicraft. What have I got to fear but the wet weather, which prevents the sugarpaste flowers from drying. I am a little bit anxious about whether V will like our creations because she came back from Australia last weekend to arrange her wedding anniversary celebrations and I haven't yet had a chance to see her. She's leaving everything to me, just giving a few instructions about colors and type of flowers.





I enjoy having a free hand at making the cake. It shall be 6 tiers, the 6th being the table. I will bake the top cake but the cupcakes will be baked by a professional baker because I just can't bake and decorate 320 cupcakes. Now I should get some sleep because tomorrow I'm going to make the actual roses for the cake.