For The 9th Sweet Til' Christmas...

Vintage Gold Poinsettia

Sugar flowers are a passion of mine. This time of year though, I don't get many requests for them. Summers are spent making lots and lots of rose, orchids, peonies & more. And once the fall dahlias & mums are done I usually end up putting away my gum paste tools for a while. 

One of the things I love about making sugar flowers is that it forces you to see the flower in a new way. Find little details that you may not have noticed before. The poinsettia might be the  kind of flower you walk past, a "super market" flower. But if you look closer, and appreciate the details, you see their unique beauty. 

Part of my sugar flower research involves learning more about flowers than you might want to know! So here are a few poinsettia fun facts:

- The botanical name "euphorbia pulcherrima" means "very beautiful"

- Poinsettias are native to southern Mexico and Guatemala, where they are a perennial shrub that can grow as large as 10 feet tall.

- Montezuma, the last of the Aztec kinds, would have poinsettias brought into what is now Mexico City by caravans because they could not be grown in higher altitudes.

- Most people think the showy colored leaves of the poinsettia are the flowers, but are actually colored bracts. The flowers or cyathia of the poinsettia are in the center of the colorful bracts.

- Poinsettias are the best selling potted plant in the United States.

So there you have it, my little tribute to the "super market" flower :)

I <3 my customers.

I love that with each order I'm challenged to do something a little better, a little differently, a little more outside the box. So when one of those fantastic customers came to me asking for a purse cake * you can carry * I said, why not?

This is the picture we started with. The blingy top and ostrich feather sides could be considered a big enough challenge on any day. 

(Wish I could find a bigger picture. Here's the link to the
website so you can zoom in on all of this fabulousness, click here)

Here's the finished beauty........

 

which with the help of my trusted assistant (and hand model)........

 

is ready to go for a night on the town! 

Midnight snack anyone?

Now I am one of those people who will take on a project like this, complete it, and then spend the rest of the day lamenting what I should have done different/better. But today, I am just going to sit back and enjoy this little moment of cake magic :)

For the cake geeks: It's entirely edible with the exception of the chain. The blinged-out top is dragees, isomalt jewels & gum paste shapes. The "feathers" are made of shredded rice paper, airbrushed with silver shimmer.

This post also marks my return to blogging! I make no promises about the frequency with which this will occur, but will do my best to share what's going on at this little cake shop of mine!