Sugar Flower Skills: The Cake Decorator's Step-By-Step Guide to Making Exquisite Lifelike Flowers - Tapa dura

A professional sugar crafter shows how to make exceptional sugar flowers for any occasion.

Sugar Flower Skills is a beautifully presented catalog of 25 fabulous blooms in a range of styles and degrees of complexity, with all the information and guidance needed to recreate them. Many are ideal for beginners and home bakers.

The book opens with a comprehensive section on materials, recipes, equipment and core techniques, which are demonstrated in step-by-step photographs. Special techniques specific to a project are shown in the 124-page flower directory, which is organized into decorative categories and by progressive skill level.

The topics include:

• Pulled Flowers and Foliage -- Simple and advanced hand-modeled for beginners with basic equipment
• Piped Sugar Flowers -- Traditional royal icing piping
• Simple Unwired Cutter Flowers -- Useful filler flowers to accent large focal flowers
• Pressed Sugar Flowers -- Realistic edible flowers using powder food colors
• Wedding Flowers and Foliage -- The essential bridal flowers: roses, lilies, peonies, orchids, plus unusual flowers and foliage
• Wild and Garden Flowers -- Interesting, seasonal projects for celebration cakes
• Fantasy Flowers -- Instant touches of fun, fantasy and glamour.

Each flower design is explained in a four-page unit, which includes a full-page photograph of the finished bloom. Detailed step-by-step instructions and close-up photographs demonstrate how to make and assemble the components.

The delicate work of decorative flowers is the last and most intimidating frontier of cake decorating. Sugar Flower Skills breaks the complexity into concise units with clear instructions. For novices and skilled decorators alike, the result is a repertoire of stunning realistic blooms for any cake.

Alan Dunn trained as a baker and confectioner but his love of sugarcraft, and of teaching how to do it, formed his career. Alan is the author of 14 sugar craft books that focus on the art of sugar flowers, and he has co-authored three books with sugar crafters Tombi Peck and Tony Warren.