I need a palm tree for next weekend. I think I should make it this week so it has time to dry. I am thinking of buying a white teir support tube from Wilton covering it in brown fondant and using scissors to cut the detail and then adding the leaves on top. Would this work?

Also what is the best way to attach the leaves, I was thinking either with a blob of fondant or a blob of royal icing.

TIA.

I was inspired by others on CC, but I used a pretzel rod for the trunk for my luau cake. You can see in the pics I chose not to cover it in fondant (just took off the salt) but I saw others who did - just do a search in the Gallery for palm tree. I think using the white support I would be worried about white showing through any spaces, but I suppose the process would be the same.

I made my leaves out of gumpaste and let them dry to be curved on a cardboard paper towel roll. "Glued" them on with RI, also attached the coconuts with RI. The one thing I noticed with the pretzel is that RI did not want to stick, so I made a little green cap of green GP on the top of the pretzel and then attached to that.

Like I said, if you look at other luau cakes or palm trees you'll see lots of ideas!

I used a wooden dowel for the center of my truck. I took a long skinny piece of fondant and wrapped it around it. I made gumpaste leaves and dried them and then attached them with candy melts cause I was in a hurry and needed to get them together.

I used a stiff floral wire, shaped white fondant around it in the shape of the trunk, left wire sticking out the top of the trunk and the bottom (so I could stick it into a styrofoam block to dry)

wire also good for the inside so you can shape it.
let that dry for a week or so.

rolled out brown fondant cut out strips of it
cut out a zig zag top pattern out of the strips.
and did them all the way around all the way up the trunk.
for the leaves also used wire in them and attached them with floral tape by their end wires to the wire sticking out the top of the tree trunk...
alot of work! but was happy with the way they turned out, since I was going for the 3-d look.

I like those trees, CarrieBear!
I just made some last week and I was happy with the overall look, just not with how I attached the leaves to the trunk.

I took a wooden skewer and stuck it through a sausage of fondant (with extra sticking out the bottom to insert in the cake), then used scissors to make the pattern. The leaves were just cut with a pizza cutter, notched with a knife and dried in the white wilton trough-type dryer things (no clue at the moment what they're called).

Once they had dried I didn't want to make up a batch of royal just for these so I softened some gumpaste and just stuck a thin layer between each leaf and stacked them. That's the part that I wasn't happy with. Just seems like there should be a better way than just stacking them...

I must say, though, they took a lot less time to make than I expected.

Good luck trying out the techniques!

jenny