Life Size Flower Class

Learnt how to make life size flowers using cold porcelain last month from this guy with an established wedding cake business. Was told that cold porcelain is another form of "icing" which is made up of PVA glue, corn starch and baby oil. Wouldn't really call it icing. It is actually some kind of clay used to make decorative items especially artificial flowers. Cold porcelain flowers are not meant to be put on cakes given its ingredients but there are people who thinks otherwise.

Anyway, cold porcelain feels like gumpaste and is a little bit softer in texture. When it is dry, it feels like plastic. In class, we were taught to use a lot of vaseline to dust our cutters and veiners to prevent the paste from sticking to it. Too much of vaseline actually made the paste too soft and oily, hence difficult to handle. Instructor wasn't very helpful and insisted that more vaseline is better. When the petals are dry, there is a layer of oil on it. Anyway, when I got home, I used corn starch and found it to be a better dusting agent.

The course brochure showed that we were supposed to make stargazer lily, magnolia, peony and moth orchid. Only when we came for class that we were informed that magnolia has been replaced with lotus as the instructor could not get cutters for magnolia!

We were given wires of different sizes for all the flowers at the beginning of the class and before long all the wires got mixed up and yours truly could not tell which wire was the correct size. Anyway, I found the order of the class to be kind of haphazard. We were jumping from one flower to another. It was difficult to follow and it was worse because I got the wires mixed up :(.

This is the moth orchid I made. Was told that I could hide the wires after appling dusting powder on them. Doesn't see to work! Should have given us white wires instead.

This is the lotus flower I made. Some petals looked as if they are about to fall off because I believe the wrong wires were used. It is very important to use the correct wire size to ensure adequate support for the petals.

This is the star gazer lily which doesn't look like one, unfortunately. The handout given showed that we need to frill the petals using cocktail sticks but we were not told to do so in class.

This is peony, "mau tan" in cantonese. Supposed to be a favourite flower for wedding cakes as the number of petals is in multiples of 8. Some other species does not have the center pistil. This one, I was told, is Chinese peony.

Last but not least, this is the instructor's piece.

I know I don't sound very pleased with the class. How to be when results are not good, right? The flowers look good from afar but not good enough for me. Will just have to make a couple more to get the hang of it. Will be using gumpaste instead.