How to Decorate with Fresh Flowers | Wedding Cakes

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Let chef Michelle Doll show you how to decorate a wedding cake with fresh flowers in this Howcast video.


So you want to arrange real flowers on your wedding cake. It's definitely a lot less expensive than using gum paste flowers. There are a few caveats. You don't want to use heavily sprayed flowers. You want to go through a respectable florist who's going to tell you the truth if these are organic. It's great to buy them from a food vendor, as well. They'll tell you exactly what's on there.

Rose's are actually edible. They taste a little bit like celery. I don't recommend eating them. So what I'm going to do instead of putting these directly into the cake where they could potentially leach out some of the moisture, and leave behind a strange aftertaste, what I'm going to do is put together a ball of fondant-ish. No one's going to see this part, so it's okay if it's a little oddly formed.

And I'm going to press this down into the seam area and this is what my flowers are going to go into instead of the cake. So I'm not going to leave any holes or any weird flavors. I have some needle-nosed pliers here. Actually, I always travel with three or four pliers. Do I need that many pliers? Yes, people tend to walk away with them, so it's good to always have some spares.

I'm just going to plunge this in. It should go up to the base of the flower. I like to work in three's at varying angles, not more. We'll probably get a couple more in on this guy. There we go, I'm going to crunch this, and let's do one up over here. There we go, so obviously that looks a little bit strange. We want to add some fillers.

This is a Monte Casino, little daisy looking flower. You could use Baby's Breath, that would be lovely. You can use the needle-nosed pliers. Luckily, these are kind of woody, so they're going in for me really easily, and you want to put fresh flowers into your cake as close to the wedding as possible. This isn't something you want to do ahead of time. They will wilt and look very sad on your wedding cake.

There we go, looking cute already. If you are working with smaller flowers, you can add a smaller bunch of fondant to put your flowers on to it with. I like to do more than just the one. So I'll do a smaller version on the top right here. Roses are snipped very close to the end and we'll just keep on adding these until our brown is filled in. That is how you put fresh flowers on your wedding cake.