1st Communion gum paste adventure- Part I

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I have been so busy this month and I have a ton of stuff to post here, but time…time is my problem 🙂
I am almost finished with the new website/blog design and soon you will see how things are going to change, but I don’t want to spoil the surprise, so I am not going to say more.

So, what else is new you would ask?
Well, I made a 1st communion cake as a gift this week. It was for Julia, the daughter of a very good friend of mine . You probably remember that I made one 1st communion cake last year as well. It was for Julia’s older sister- Carina.
I had a hard time deciding what should I do for Julia’s cake.
At first I had an idea about lace gloves, but then I started thinking about handkerchief..and I asked my friend if she has one as a keepsake from her mom ( Julia’s grandmother). It turns out she had one!It was just perfect!!!
Then I started thinking about the flowers, my friend’s name is Rose, so I figured roses would be appropriate, and the girl’s favorite color is light-purple-violetish, so it was decided.

But, there was one small problem-I have never made gum paste or gum paste flowers in my life, so I had to prepare at least a week in advance to make sure everything will go smooth.
And I started with the gum paste recipe of Scott Clark Woolley.
Then I remembered I had seen a very beautiful cake that Louise from Cakejournal.com made and she shared some tips on how to make gum paste roses. She had posted a link to the tutorial on how to make gum paste roses of a very talented cake designer Fran McGregor. The link is in the 23rd post after the picture and you’ll have to download it.

Although I used a few pointers on how to make the roses from the tutorial, I want to emphasize that my roses are completely edible, except for the floral wire. The other difference is that I didn’t use the cutter Fran uses, I used regular teardrop shape metal cutters and applied the petals one by one, attaching them with plain egg white.
You can see here my very first gum paste rose

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This is the first set of flowers

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This is when I made the calyxes

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Here is some more:
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Here is the bouquet before I placed it on the cake
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And you can read the second part, where you can actually see the ready cake.