How I made the Tree for the Pooh & Friends 100 Acre Woods Cake

I used 22 gauge wire, floral tape, dowels, bamboo skewers, chocolate candy, cotton balls and two colors of green petal dust.
I started by twisting together two or three pieces of wire at varying lengths and taping them together.
Then using the floral tape again, I taped these small branches together in bunches of two or three.
I did not have anything appropriate for the trunk of the tree so I used what I had to make it work...
I cut a dowel to the size I wanted for the trunk (alone, do not include depth of cake or middle reaching branches), cut 4 more the same size.
I then measured 4 skewers to the length of the dowel plus the depth of the cake.
After all the dowels and skewers were cut I bundled them together with floral tape using one dowel as the center and alternating dowels and skewers around it (be sure the points of the skewers are low enough to go through the cake.
Next I put my branches into the trunk taping them securely. By the time I was done The whole tree was covered in floral tape and was ready to be covered in the candy.
I staked my tree into some Styrofoam and began covering little branches from the top and worked my way down.
Once my branches were covered I started covering the trunk of the tree from the bottom up tapering the size as I went.
The roots were added.
Then I took several cotton balls at a time and shredded them out and rolled the fiber in my hand until a whimsical cloud like structure formed and then dusted them with the green petal dust and adhered them to the branches with corn syrup.

Thank you Shstover for taking the time to post this. Quick question about the cotton balls...so, if you used cotton balls that would make the tree non-edible, right? and when you said 'shredded cotton balls' did you just pull them apart with your hands?

Ok, thanks a lot for sharing this!

Maybe to make the tree completely edible you could use candy floss (cotton candy) as the "leaves"?

Your tree is very cool! I used a very similar method to build the family tree in my gallery just last week!.

I used 14g wires and 22g wires and skipped the taping step. Mine was built around a pvc pipe that had random holes in it. I anchored the 14g wires into the holes and wrapped around to form the branches and then added smaller branches with the smaller wire. Covered the branches in chocolate candy clay and used wired gumpaste leaves simply poked into the candy clay. There is a pic in my gallery of the pipe and wires before the clay was added.

You are right Rosie2, most of don't eat cotton balls but if they are eaten it is after all organic material. I really wanted to use cotton candy but it's summer in Florida the humidity is very high so there was no way the tree would have survived. However, if one of you NORTHERN folks plan on making the tree I would love to see how it would have looked with cotton candy rather than cotton balls!!!

About shredding the cotton balls....Yes, I pulled them apart in my hands then rolled them around in my hands to loosely put them back together.

Your tree is amazing...thank you for the instructions!