How to Make Flowers Food Safe

Watch more Cake Decorating Tips and Tricks from CakeMade videos: http://www.howcast.com/videos/517442-How-to-Make-Flowers-Food-Safe

Learn how to decorate a cake with real flowers while keeping the cake food safe, courtesy of cake artist Liz Marek. Check out Liz’s course Rustic Wedding Cake Trends on CakeMade.com: http://bit.ly/1upK3jK

Hi I’m Liz Marek and I’m teaching a new cake course called Rustic Wedding Cakes on Cake Made. It’s going to awesome. I’m going to show you how to make this beautiful rustic birch log cakes super-hot design. I’m going to show you how to make the cake board, stack the cake, decorate all the tiers. We’re going to be making wafer paper flowers. We’re going to be making owl toppers. It’s going to be awesome. I’m also going to show you how to make a really trendy cake called, The Chalkboard Cake design. You definitely want to see that one. But first, I want to show you how to make fresh flowers, food safe. This is a big deal when you’re making a cake with fresh flowers. You want to prepare them in a very special way so that nobody has to worry about any sort of chemicals or yuckiness inside their cake. To prepare your rose, we’re going to peel off the extra leaves, break it off or you can cut it. I think I’m just going to insert this right on the side so it looks like it’s peeking out from between the two tiers. And I want to include a little bit of foliage, so I’m going to take a couple of our leaves and I’m just hold that together at the base. And we’re going to take a little bit of our floral tape, give it a stretch and just wrap that around the base of your leaves. And that just to hold the leaves together at this point. And then we’re going to put our flower. It’s like you’re kind of creating a very large buttoner. And they we’re going to take another piece of floral tape, give it a stretch, and wrap that around until you cover up the ends of the flowers completely. If you need another piece of floral tape, by all means, you can use another one and layer it up. Just make sure that the bottom of the flowers are completely covered. And what that does is, that actually just stops any sort of water that is inside the flower from leaking out. And that does two things, it keeps the flower fresher for longer and it also keeps any of that water from getting into your cake which could have pesticides in it. It could have any kind of chemicals, stuff you don’t really want to be eating, but it’s important to keep the flower nice and fresh.

So now it’s time to insert our floral arrangement into our bubble tea straw. Just guage about how long you need it to be. You want to have a good, one inch, past the end of your stem just so there’s no chance of that digging into your cake and cut that off. And you can see why we need to use the bigger bubble tea straw, so you have enough space for all of this floral. Stick that in there and then I’m just going to place this right in here. Making sure I don’t squish my cake. I’m going to use my scissors to sort of reach in here and push it down a little bit further. You could also use wire cutters or pliers or something like that, if you need to reach in there. So now, I’m going to put in a few other little flowers and filler leaves and things like that to fill out this bottom space. Whenever you’re creating a floral arrangement, you want to think about your symmetry and you don’t want to overwhelm your cake design with flowers, But you usually use one or two flowers, maybe three, if you have enough space. Usually, in this kind of design, you want to go with uneven numbers because we’re not really going for super symmetrical. Break off this flower. It’d be really cool to be cutting into your wedding cake and you can smell beautiful roses and vanilla. It’s pulling all the way around. Another piece of floral tape. Whenever you’re creating these floral design, be sure you always have something to use as filler. If you just have big fat flowers, you’re going to end up having these holes that you can’t really fill and that can really create a problem in your design. So make sure you have some leaves or some other little tiny flower buds and things like that to use as part of the design. Let’s put that right in here. Push that way down in there.

So as you can see, making our fresh flowers food safe is not too difficult at all. It’s just mostly using your floral tape to wrap everything together and then using some bubble tea straws to insert them into the cake. I doesn’t take much time and all and looks really great. Okay, so I filled in all of our little crevices and holes with foliage and other little flowers so that you don’t have any sort of visuals of the support structures. So that’s basically what we were doing with all the filler flowers. I’ve got my