Wednesday, October 31, 2012

200 year old sugar flowers

By Joyce Freeman


If you think that the stunning sugar flowers you see covering modern party cakes are a relatively new invention then you will be shocked to discover that they have been around for a long time.

Making gum paste flowers has an extensive history

Actually sugar craft has an extensive record, although there does not appear to be any record of when it really started nonetheless , there are still copies of books by the Seventeenth Century cookery and household management author, John Murrell, in which he indoctrinates his readers on the usage of sugar craft and how to make them. The centrepiece for a Seventeenth century royal banquet was frequently a sugar creation made from marzipan and pastillage, made from icing/confectioners ' sugar mixed with corn flour (corn starch) and gum.

Over the following TWO HUNDRED years its recognition declined till the middle of the 19th century when the French began to supply elaborately decorated cakes and the art speedily spread right across Europe.

New method

In The USA, in about 1929, a new method of cake decorating, based mainly on covering cakes with cream or frosting, was developed by a company called Wilton Enterprises. At first they held classes for professional bakers, but in 1947 they began to produce a selection of bake-ware and cake decorations that enabled everybody to provide their own decorated cakes.

Fragile

Then, in England, in the early 1980's wedding and celebration cakes started to appear, not iced with the conventional hard royal topping, but covered with softer, rolled fondant icing and decorated with delicate gumpaste flowers.

Preferred method

These new sorts of decorations were soon adopted by countries such as Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, whose tradition of cake decorating was in royal icing but because of the climate, set as hard as rock and made cutting the cake just about impossible. The softer fondant icing suited the climate much better so it swiftly became the preferred strategy of decorating a cake.

Folk who saw these gum paste flowers wanted to be told how to make these glorious creations and particularly wanted to find out how to make them for the cakes that they made.

Everyone loves them

The utilisation of these flowers in addition has been gaining in popularity in The USA and Canada over the last TEN years and, recently, 1 or 2 TV shows have boosted its recognition.




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