6 Ways to Decorate Cakes and Cookies With Flowers
Sarah Carey offers tips for giving your baked treats a pretty, seasonal look.
Ngoc Minh Ngo
Spring is the perfect time of year to incorporate flowers into your baking, and there are a number of ways to decorate cakes, cupcakes, and cookies with everything from fresh edible blooms to frosting. Whichever method you choose, your decorated desserts are sure to make someone smile—and that’s one of the best reasons to bake.
Related: 20 Edible Flower Recipes That Are Colorful and Delicious
Edible Flowers
The easiest way to decorate with flowers is to buy edible flowers and arrange them on your cake, like on this Daffodil Cake.
Tips
Make sure the flowers you are using are an edible variety, and they have not been sprayed.
Ideas for Decorating With Edible Flowers
Use as many or as few flowers as you like, but choose a simple color palette so it’s not confusing.
Sprinkle a few petals on top of a cake for an elegant and beautiful look.
Use one statement bloom in the center of a cake or cupcake.
Mix small, delicate flowers with nonpareils or pearlescent sugar balls.
Sugared Flowers
While you can buy sugared flowers, such as sugared violets or sugared rose petals, they are quite simple to make. All you need is egg white, superfine sugar, and some edible flowers. Use pasteurized egg whites rather than raw egg whites if you prefer, and follow our instructions. I used sugared violets and rose petals to festoon these Embellished Wreath Cookies
Edible Dried Flowers
Edible dried flowers are a beautiful and easy way to decorate cakes. There are a huge variety of types available at Middle Eastern food stores, cake decorating stores, and online. I used a sprinkle of dried rose petals on these Mini Pistachio Bundts to add some gorgeous color.
When you use dried flowers, be judicious—a little goes a long way. They are dried and thus concentrated in flavor (and their texture isn’t so tasty), so you don’t want to overwhelm the cake or cookie. It’s really more about the look than the taste.
Flower Shapes
A cute and unexpected way to decorate is to frost cupcakes in different colors and arrange them into a flower shape. I developed this sunflower cupcake for a birthday party, but it’s also great for any celebration since it’s such an attention-grabbing and fun display. No piping needed, but you do need to tint frosting in a few colors and frost the cupcakes—I used a palette knife for easy frosting—and you need a large board to assemble the flower on. You can use cupcakes or mini cupcakes for this and change the arrangement to form any type of flower.
Candy Flowers
Aaron Dyer
These candy flowers are such fun. We share several ideas for making flowers using different types and colors of candy. The easiest technique is to roll sour candy strips into a rose to top a cupcake. The others call for snipping candy, such as marshmallows or gummy peaches, into petal-shaped pieces and building a chrysanthemum or rose, petal by petal.
Tips
Spray your scissors with oil spray before you cut the candy so it doesn’t stick to the scissors
If you prefer chocolate candy, try this alternative: pick two or three colors of M&Ms and use them to make flowers on top of cupcakes. Practice on a small plate first to work out your pattern.
Piping Flowers
Mike Krautter
If you already enjoy making piped decorations for cakes and cupcakes, we’re here for you—and if you’re new to decorating with frosting, it’s a fun, creative skill worth learning. Any cake with piped decorations is extra special, whether it’s for a kid’s birthday or a backyard wedding. A lot can be done with just one piping tip. These Sunflower Cupcakes only use one tip and Swiss Meringue Buttercream for the piped decorations; candied sunflower seeds make the centers of the sunflowers.
These roses are also made using one piping tip:
These daisies require two tips and a steady hand, but are so pretty:
Royal icing is an alternative to buttercream if you're looking to add more structure to your flowers. I piped these cherry blossoms using royal icing, then placed the finished flowers on a wedding cake I made for friends:
Sarah Carey
Tips
Make extra frosting to allow for mistakes.
When tinting frosting, tint a small amount at a time to control the color—you can always add more color, but you can’t take it out.
To fill the piping bag, stand it inside a tall glass or quart jar, and fold the edges down to fill the bag with frosting; then fold the edges up to keep it clean on top.
Don’t overfill the bag. Use a rubber band to close the bag.
Practice before you pipe on the cake.
Pipe blooms onto squares of parchment paper and chill them to make it easy to transfer to the cake.
Read the original article on Martha Stewart.
