Follow up from my Sugarcraft sunflower wedding cake, here’s the process for making the flowers and leaves

Since I had a few questions about the flowers I thought you folks might find the process interesting. I made roses for a cake about 10 years ago, so there was a bit of figuring out needed to make these. I literally bought some sunflowers counted and measured petals and luckily found cutters with a similar shape.

Steps to make the flowers and leaves:

1. For the bases I used melted dark chocolate with rice crispies with 18 gauge wires and let them set in a mini tart pan. To keep the wire from slipping out, I bent them into a perpendicular spiral and embedded it in the chocolate. Once hard I used a fine grater to smooth out the shape

2. Next I covered them in a brown sugar flower paste and used a pointy tool to add texture to the sunflower centres. My paste wasn’t a great colour so I painted them with some brown food colouring mixed with vodka

3. I made the leaves using a green flower paste and inserted 24 gauge wire into the leaves. Once set I used some green food colouring mixed with vodka to add colour then bound them to the 18 gauge wire using florist tape to make branches

4. Then it was time to apply the petals, the first one took about 2 hours, but by then end I was down to 40 mins. The process was rollout, cut, shape with a modelling tool then using a veined to emboss a petal finish

5. The last step was to add some dimension using petal dust to create the colouring on the centres and petals. I used a light and burnt orange to achieve the effect