Artificial Flowers On Wedding Cake
Decorating By Rashetta Updated 10 Aug 2005 , 8:53pm by SquirrellyCakes
Hi! I'm doing my first major wedding cake in September for my husbands nieces wedding and she wants artificial flowers on the cake. This will be my first time working with artificial flowers and I was wondering if anyone has any tips on how to put them on the cake and when I wash the flowers, should I use any special to clean them? Any suggestions will be great!
Thank you,
Rashetta
Well you can use a product like Woolite, but personally I just sit them in the bathtub and use regular old detergent and tepid water. I rinse them and let them dry.
What you cannot do, is you cannot stick the wires into a cake. If you are planning to do this, the wired ends must be in flower spikes or you must competely seal the wired end with a plastic wrap or foil. Once you cut stems, the wire in the plastic stem is exposed, this is what you need to wrap.
Your flowers can sit directly on top of your cake as long as no wire is exposed. Sometimes you can remove just the flower blossoms and the flowers stay intact, otherwise you will need to gluegun them together.
Or you can cut circles of waxed paper or parchment or even use clean cardboard circles and use these as a barrier between the flowers and the iced cake.
Hugs Squirrelly
Hugs Squirrelly
You could also arrange them in styrofoam in a small plastic bowl, like the "crystal bowl" that Wilton sells in their line of cake toppers. You'd have to prepare the cake the same way you would for any other cake topper (powdered sugar, then a covered cakeboard, then the bowl), but I'm not sure if you'd need to support it with a dowel.
Haha, well sure Sugar, wherever you can. I should have said that I bleach the bathtub before using it, haha! I use the bathtub because I am usually doing up a whole bunch of flowers and I wash them while the stems are attached. Then to let them drip dry, so they are not flat, I tie them in bunches by the stem (or use elastics), leaving a loop to go over the shower curtain rod or towel racks as I have some in the tub enclosure. One of the best things I have is one of those bath seat benches that we used for my elderly mother. It naturally had a bunch of holes in the seat, for drainage purposes, so I can stick the stemmed flower through the holes to dry. For a lot of flowers like tulips and roses, you don't want to put them flat while drying as it can misshape them.
You could wash them in a laundry tub too, I just find this method easier. Whatever works!
Most of these flowers dry fairly quickly. You should always do a colour wash test first. I have yet to have any issues with colours bleeding out when washed, but test to be sure.
A little advice, if you are going to need a lot of flowers, instead of getting individual stems, get the bouquets that consist of several attached at the stem as a bouquet, it works out a lot cheaper and they cut easily too.
Hugs Squirrelly
lol, that seems okay. Your bathtub is probably cleaner than mine then!
Heehee, well it does have its moments. When I first starting using silk flowers I remember that folks were not even washing them. I had a fit thinking of the dust and such on them and the fact they had been handled by who knows how many people. So I started experimenting with washing the various kinds, from the cheapos to the better quality. I have yet to have a problem with any of them not washing well. I wouldn't wash the flocked pointsettias though, the ones that are plastic with a sort of velvety finish on top.
I have better quality roses that I bought for my mother over 30 years ago. They still look like new, they get a few baths a year, haha!
You have to check the flowers you are using to make sure there is no felt or paper used in the leaves and such. I even take the shower hose to the centres if the flowers have a really tight bud in the centre. It works well.
Hugs Squirrelly
Just a side note about Kitchen sink vs. Bathtub. I read an article awhile back that stated that after test in peoples homes that the Bathroom was actually a cleaner room than a kitchen. I know this sounds weird to me too. But most people throughly clean their bathrooms more often because of the germs/and other nasty stuff in there, than the kitchen which has just as many germs, but a lot of people just don't think about it. Now us as cake decorators/bakers/cooks do think about it more often i'm sure, b/c we have to prepare food for others in our kitchens. But I thought it was an interesting read.
That's interesting. I also heard that your office is probably more dirty than the office bathroom. Ick! I'm really a clean freak though, so you could probably come to my house and eat off the floors and be okay.
Something about the bathtub though I dislike, even if it is "germ free". Perhaps it goes back to the Seinfield episode where Kramer made the dinner in the bathtub. lol
That's interesting. I also heard that your office is probably more dirty than the office bathroom. Ick! I'm really a clean freak though, so you could probably come to my house and eat off the floors and be okay.
Something about the bathtub though I dislike, even if it is "germ free". Perhaps it goes back to the Seinfield episode where Kramer made the dinner in the bathtub. lol
Sugar, I was like that when the children were small and I was at home. I washed my floors, vaccumed and dusted every day, cleaned the bathrooms twice a day too. Then I went back to work and couldn't be quite the fanatic I was. Interestingly, that is when my girls developed allergies. I have a sister-in-law that is absolutely obsessive about cleaning and her children are allergic to everything. There is a theory now that the incidence of childhood asthma and allergies has increased so much because we are too clean, use too many anti-bacterial soaps and such. I honestly believe it. You never heard of the kinds of allergies people have now, 40 or 50 years ago.
Heehee, apparently a "peck of dirt' is good exposure, haha! Wish I had heard that many years ago!
Hugs Squirrelly Cakes
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