How to Paint a Peony | Sugar Flowers

Watch more How to Make Simple Sugar Paste Flowers videos:

Learn how to paint peony sugar paste flowers from cake designer Amy Noelle in this Howcast cake decorating tutorial, part 6 of a 6-part series.


After I've added all of the petals to my peony, I'm ready to paint it. I'm
going to paint it with petal dust. Petal dust has the consistency of ground
up chalk. I just dip a nice, flat paint brush into my petal dust and brush
off the extra. I can always add more paint, but I can't always take it off.
I'm just going to take and dust. In this case, I'll dust all over my peony,
my dry peony. It's been dried for, at least, 24 hours before I paint it.
I'm just going to brush as much dust as I'd like to in order to create the
color that I'm looking for. In this case, a nice deep magenta color.

Peonies come in all sorts of different colors like, say, white or light and
dark pink tends to be the most popular colors for peonies. So I'm just
going to brush all over and create a nice, deep pink peony color. Now, in
order to finish off, you'll notice that we still have a few pieces that are
exposed, and may not look quite the best. What I do with that is cover it
with a green calyx. So I've cut out a green calyx with a calyx cutter. They
have special calyx cutters that can be used in order to create this shape.
We've rolled green gum paste on a pasta machine, and then cut out using
this shape.

The other thing that I've done to it is to just pinch around the edges, to
make the edges nice and flat. I'll pierce my wire straight through and turn
it over so I can see where it is. And with a teeny, tiny little bit of
glue, I'll just attach each of the calyx pieces. I'll just brush on, on
each one of those little pieces, brush a little bit of glue, just to make
sure that it sticks where I want to. And essentially what I'm doing is
covering up those little bits that might not look as sharp as the rest.
It's amazing what a calyx can do, in order to create a completely finished
off flower.