Sugar Flowers

This week I did the five day PME course in Sugar Flowers at Cakes4Fun, which is a mere 150 metres from this house

If you’re in your 30s and as a child watched BBC while eating your tea, you will probably recognise the bowler-hatted man coming out of 52 Festive Road. Putney was home to the man who created Mr Benn. When the humble bank clerk wasn’t solving problems for dragons or elephants or cavemen, he lived just round the corner from Cakes4Fun and is commemorated on a paving stone outside the original house. This thrills me out of all proportion.

Once again, the other ladies on the course had come from all over the world – Budapest, Johannesburg, Dubai, Arizona – so my journey from Newcastle seemed neglible.


My knowledge of flowers is minimal and stretches as far as “red ones, white ones, yellow ones” so I had plenty-plenty to learn. Monday was a gentle start making a plaque with non-wired flowers.

Work started in earnest the next day with a woodland bouquet using the pulled flower method. I finally found out a) what the holes in a celpad are for (Mexican hats), b) what the mysterious little celpad stick is for (Mexican hats) and c) what a Mexican hat is.  The pulled flower method had the highest casualty rate and it was a lot of work to create a small bouquet. I love the blackberries.

The next three days covered wired flowers – open rose; lilies and orchids; and a bridal bouquet.

At the end of each day spent cutting, veining, wiring and dusting petals comes the heartbreak of binding, when you have to say goodbye to some petals that break or don’t stay on the wire. It’s sad to spend so much effort creating a beautiful petal that in the end doesn’t make the final cut. Like spending years raising a child only to have him support Sunderland. The back up plan, apart from having lots of children and dressing them in black and white, is to make lots of spare petals for the reserve bench.


My favourite flowers in the bridal bouquet are the apple blossom and Sweet Williams. Kate Middleton included Sweet Williams in her bridal bouquet and the flowers were renamed Prince Williams in our class. My own William is sweet as a little pie and it turns out that Mr Benn's first name was William.

Sweet Williams

Sugar flowers demand concentration and it was surprisingly tiring work. Luckily we were kept energised with a constant supply of delicious cakes, cake pops and cookies.

I had a great time on the course, met some lovely people and felt that I learned a lot. Making sugar flowers taught me to open my eyes and look closely at a flower with all its idiosyncracies in the hope of recreating it in sugar. 

In other London news:

Helen and her fellow illustration graduates put on a successful exhibition at the Coningsby gallery and I bought three more pictures of cats for my pension plan office wall. I mentioned Helen’s work here and am very proud to say that, having graduated this summer with a first class degree in Illustration, she already has a contract to publish her first children’s book in spring.

Annabel is becoming increasingly addicted to courses at Cakes4Fun. Having got her hooked with the soft stuff (“go on, try a cupcake course or a cakepop lesson, you'll like it”) she’s rapidly moved onto the harder fixes of stacking tiered cakes and today has made this beautiful butterfly cake. The bag of chocolate truffles she made at an evening class was excellent company on the train home.

I had a lovely time staying with Petra and Dylan, both of whom celebrate a birthday this week.

STILL in our 30s

Petra had a birthday dinner with friends and Dylan is celebrating his first birthday today by holding a soiree for his two best friends Rico and Cookie. I’ve said it before, those London doggies live the life. Happy birthday, handsome!

Carousel Cake

I've been wanting to make a carousel cake ever since I bought a PME rocking horse cutter in January. This week I found several excuses to do so:

• it was my birthday on Tuesday and I could see no reason not to celebrate turning 39 by making myself a cake better suited to a small child.
• Renshaw have just brought out new regal icing colours including ruby red and my favourite duck egg blue and I was keen to try them.
• Wednesday saw the first Clandestine Cake Club in Newcastle with cakes themed as childhood summer memories (for all the summery cakes, see here).
• my alma mater Cakes4Fun are running a competition entitled 'What Summer Means to Me' that I wanted to enter. For me, summer is a travelling fair and here is why. 

New York has Central Park, London has Hyde Park and Newcastle upon Tyne has the Town Moor, home to a couple of hundred cows and little else. At the end of June every year since 1882 the cows clear off to Benidorm on a cheap 10 night deal while the moor hosts one of Europe's largest travelling fairs, the Hoppings. This short video neatly shows the contrast.

As a child the most exciting day in the year for me after Christmas was the day I went to the Hoppings. I remember almost levitating with excitement as we approached the rides. The smell of chip fat and candy floss blended with diesel generators and the throaty thud of pop music still plucks at my heart. I remember the time it was so wet when I was 7 that the mud came over the top of my wellies (I was undeterred - nothing kept me off a waltzer); the time aged 10 that me and my cousin slipped the safety bar inside an American Egg and rattled about inside it like a couple of tictacs; and the time we lost Yvonne inside the helter skelter on my 6th birthday trip and I loudly suggested that she'd been stolen by the gypsies, just as our mothers had warned.

Here's me 35 years ago by the dodgems sporting a little dress and hat that my mum had sewn.

Last year, Caroline and I took her girls Hannah and Becca to the fair and they loved it.

So my summertime theme was a fairground ride. I tried to tone down the out and out kitsch of a carousel horse but kept the mirrors, the gold and the garlands of flowers around the horses' necks. 

The cake could  even go round and round and I made a three second video of my cousin Helen moving the turntable of it springing into life. Watch here and be amazed!

After ten days of Hoppings fun, the rides are dismantled, the travellers move on and the cows come home with as much duty free as they could buy. In much the same way, my cake was dismantled. It didn't have far to travel and there was still some left for breakfast.