I decided to make a cake with flowers on it (planning a mixture of royal icing, buttercream and maybe gumpaste) for my daughter's first birthday. This morning I was looking through the supplies handed down to me by my mom and found a domed flower nail, kind of like this one, except metal. http://www.winbeckler.com/catalog/general/43-IN554.jpg I found one description that said it's for roses and similar flowers, but I can't find pictures of anyone using one to make any type of flower. A search of YouTube just let me know that dome is a drug term. Can anyone tell me what it's for? Thanks for any help!

A domed flower nail is manufactured by Ateco and sold as the "chrysanthemum" nail. The domed shape is for forming heavy flowers such as marigolds, chrysanthemums and dahlias without making them solid icing. But you have to make the flower from royal icing and let it dry before you remove it from the nail.

What she said ^^^^^.
It is an old idea - to make thick flowers a bit thinner and no so heavy.

That makes sense. So would you then build up a dome of royal icing (or whatever you were using to stick it to the cake) before putting it on?

When you pipe a mum or dahlia on a flat (rose) flower nail, you first make a dome of icing.

Using this domed nail means you grease it and pipe the petals directly onto it without making an icing dome. Let the flower dry and pop it off with the tip of a small knife.

Once the flower is piped on the nail & dried, remove for future use. That's why they usualy are piped in royal icing - they are dried hard! When placing on a cake NO dome or lump of icing is necessary. Just pipe a leaf or two to help hold it in place.

Thanks for the info! I knew you built the dome of icing first but this seemed so much bigger that what I'm used to and what I've seen in tutorial videos, so I didn't connect the two. I haven't done much with making flowers so I'll try both nails and see which works better for me.