How To Decorate A Cake With Fondant Flowers

Consuming a piece of cake can go by so quickly, yet decorating a cake can certainly be long and tedious. We’ve decided to narrow down the cake decorating game and pitch the idea of fondant flowers to you. These delicate, beautiful cake components are so worth trying to make. Here’s a step-by-step rundown of the work that goes into making fondant flowers used as cake embellishments.

What You’ll Need

• Fruit leather (This tutorial uses store bought for this project. If you wanted to match a specific color, then making your own might work better for you).
• Round cookie cutters
• Small bowl of water
• Small paint brush
• Floral wire (tooth picks or skewers would work as well)
• Piece of foam
• Rolling Pin

Step 1.

Flatten out the sheet of fruit leather with a rolling pin.

Step 2.

Use a round cookie cutter to cut circles out of the fruit leather. The size of the cutter you use will determine how large of a puff you have at the end. For these puffs we used round cutters that were 1/2” to 2” in diameter.

Step 3.

Pick up a fruit leather flow, and using your thumbs and forefingers, press the sides of the round together towards the center of the circle. You’ll end up with a shape resembling a ruffled “x”. Just be sure to press towards the center of the circle, so that you don’t close the “x” entirely. The open loops are what give the puff its shape. Repeat with other circles.

Step 4.

For a nice full puff we used 6 fruit leather rounds per puff. You can use more or less depending on how full you’d like the puff to be. To begin to form a puff, press 2 of the ruffled fruit leather rounds together at their points.

Step 5.

If the fruit leather has begun to dry out, brush on a small amount of water so that they stick together. Add more ruffles until you achieve the desired puff shape.

Step 6.

Set formed puff onto a piece of styrofoam. Use floral wires or tooth picks to prop up the fruit leather puff into it’s desired shape. Allow to dry out over night. Using the wires or toothpicks helps keep the puff from drooping or loosing it’s shape as it dries.  You may need to allow puffs to dry out longer depending on the humidity.

Step 7. 

Apply to a finished cake using small dots of royal icing, or if applying to fondant just brush on a small amount of water where you’d like the puff to stick.

While cake flowers can look fairly “wedding-oriented,” especially since the recipe over at Wedding Girls inspired us, we’d like to encourage you to use them on any cake regardless of the celebration. There’s a ton of ways to decorate a cake but the fondant flowers are such gorgeous little details. It would be a shame to not give them a try!

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