I am going to be making a cake for my sister's birthday next month. We are having a luau and I wanted to try and do a cake for her with Hibiscus Flowers on it, but can't seem to find anything on how to do them. Is there somewhere I can look or maybe there's another flower I can make that will look like the Hibiscus? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

I'm not sure how to make the hibiscus, but another flower you could use is the plumeria, they're easy to make out of marshmallows.

Never made one....I'm very new to all this but wouldn't the lily nail work?

I will learn To make them in my gumpaste class on wednesday. I can tell you how to make them after that.

Funny you should ask about hibiscus. I just learned how to make them out of royal icing. You use the largest lily nail, line it with very thin/cheap aluminum foil (foil candy wrapping squares are great). Using petal tip #104, you pipe in five large petals--start at the bottom with the wide end of the tip touching the bottom of the nail and come up, round off over the edge of the nail, and go back down to the bottom. If you stripe the bag, you get a nice central line color change and don't need to pipe tip #3 lines up the center--unless you want to. You can dig out the surplus icing in the center--halfway to all the way down to the bottom of the nail (I use a thin paintbrush handle to do this) and then pipe in a tip #5 yellow or orange stamen--fat at the bottom and tapering at the top and as tall as you prefer. Set the flower aside--on it's still foil covered bottom with the stamen up straight or at the angle you want--and when the stamen is pretty dry, pipe about five little tip 2 extensions off the top of the stamen. These will need many days to dry through, but you can get the foil off pretty easily around day 4.

In the photo, you can see a yellow one with a blue stamen, a pink one, and a blue one. Each was made by a different person, so they vary slightly, but you can tell what they are

Hope this is helpful and clear.
Rae

Wow, now I have to try that!

mamakau - how do you make them out of marshmallows?

cake_princess - I would love to know how to make them after you take your class, thanks!

BlakesCakes - Thank you for those instructions, I will try them

I am sorry I dont know hot to make hibiscus flower but I just love this cake.
All flowers are beautiful.

Thanks
Nitu

I'll try to describe how to make a plumeria out of marshmallows....you take a couple marshmallows, then cut each lengthwise into 3 pieces. You can then shape 5 of those pieces into petals, put the petals together into the shape of a plumeria flower, then paint some yellow or pink food coloring in the center of the flower. It looks really nice, especially on a cupcake.

Ok, I think I understand what you mean. Now, you are talking about big marshmallows right, not the little ones?

Yeah, the large size marshmallows, sorry, I meant to put that in the description.

Does anybody else have any pictures? Especially of the marshmallow plumeria!

I don't know about hibiscus, but plumeria are great for tropical cakes, you can make a large primrose with royal icing, in white with a yellow center and that will look like plumeria. Also looks good in bright tropical colors.

I made these hibiscus out of MMF with a little Tylose powder added so it acted more like gumpaste. I sort of made it up as I went along, but started like a gumpaste azalea if you've made those before. For the stamen, I used a toothpick covered in gumpaste and shaped a little.

Here is a link to make the wilton Petunia (with royal icing), it looks very similar to the hisbiscus. The slight difference is that the hibiscus petals overlap each other.
http://www.wilton.com/decorating/basic/petunia.cfm

Also wilton has just come out with different types of stamens and the large one (in the picture on the link below it is the one on the right) is great for the hisbiscus. You reallyl need to see the stamen, the picture does them not justice.
http://www.wilton.com/store/site/product.cfm?id=01B89500-423B-522D-FA07194868CD9579

Here is a picture of the ones that grow in my yard (they are larger than a dinner plate).

Thought I would also include a close-up. These are a large variety, we have different ones but these are the only ones in bloom right. I have these in white and another in pink.

The pictures of the real ones are very helpful. It's hard to make a copy of a copy of a copy - too many errors creep in, and details lost. Thank you.

Made a graduation cap cake and cupcakes for my daughter's graduation luau -- everyone raved. My Mom made the flowers, I was focussing on the food and decorations -- they were Wilton petunias made in the large lilly nail using rose tip 104 - you can use store bought stamens.

Ooh! I have directions for petunias! Thanks!
Great colors, BTW!

That's a lot of cupcakes, beautiful!

I remember seeing directions with pictures for making hibiscus either here on CC or on the Wilton site. Maybe if you did a search it would bring up the thread.

Thanks for the picture of the real Hibiscus..ive actually never seen one before. As 7yyrt said...copies of copies of copies are hard to do, especially if you really dont even know what the original looks like.

Its just like playing telephone!!

Thanks alot for all the different ideas/instructions!

The most popular color of hibiscus here in Hawai'i is red. The state flower is the yellow hibiscus or "ma'ohauhele" in Hawaiian. Just wanted to share

I was doing a luau cake for my girl's b-day party. I wanted hibiscus flowers but have never used a flower nail so I wanted to try something with mmf....and this is what I came up with. It was as close to a "hawaiian" flower as I could get. You may be looking for more authentic - and I think the other posts above will definitly give you that, this is a low tech approach.

I used the regular wilton flower cut out, cut the pettals in a litter, used one of the veining and ball tools and the foam to shape. I dried then on flower formers and kept moving them around every 15 minutes or so so they each had a cupped look.....I used mmf with trylose mixed in. Then painted with pearl luster.

Good luck

Everyone is so helpful! Thank you so much. I am going to be starting my sabbatical for the whole month of Aug from work this Friday, so I will have lots of time before the party to try and get this right. =o) Thank you everyone for all the advice!