Hi,

I'm extremely new to cake decorating, and am making some cupcakes for a friend's birthday. I bought some sugarpaste and a PME flower cutter as I just want to add a few flowers to each cupcake on top of the buttercream icing.

I intend to colour the sugarpaste in different colours to match with the different colours of icing, and had a few questions:

1. How long in advance of making the flowers do I need to colour the sugarpaste? Can it be immediate or is it best to leave it a day? Also, once it is coloured should I roll it out immediately or leave it for a while?

2. Is a plastic rolling pin necessary? Or can I just use a wooden one?

3. Do I need to add CMC/gum tragacanth to the sugarpaste in order to make these flowers? They will just be sitting amongst the buttercream, I hope, so no need for them to be too hard.

4. If so, how much of the CMC/gum trag would be needed?

Sorry if these seem like simple questions but I'm very new to this! I hope I'm not being too unrealistic about what I'm setting out to do, haha.

Thanks in advance everyone

Steph

Thank you! That's a great help.

Also, is there anywhere specific I would leave the decorations to dry? I'm assuming they can't go in the refrigerator?