Cake Decorating with buttercream flowers A complete step-by-step guide to placing flowers on cake icing and taking the art of cake decorating to new heights.

Introduction

This book is like our cake journey. If you have read our first book, The Contemporary Buttercream Bible, you will remember our first ever buttercream encounter – we piped a sunflower using a Ziploc bag as an improvised piping bag. The results were not great. But then we put clear tape around the end of the bag and cut a V shape for an instant nozzle, and a few moments after, Queen of Hearts Couture Cakes was founded! From that first 'beautiful' sunflower cupcake, we instantly became obsessed with piping. We learned how to pipe two more flowers… then five... then eight.. and now, 100!

Our love of colour has made us treasure beautiful flowers as inspirations for planning our cake designs. A few years ago, we started our 'Flowers To Do List' as a prompt to try to learn how to pipe as many flowers as we could, but we never really thought that the day would come when we would reach our target of 100 flowers and fulfil our ambition to put them in a book. The flowers here are all inspired by real flowers. Despite the fact that there are specific nozzles to use for so many different effects, there have still been some limitations in achieving anatomically correct flowers. This though does not affect the beauty of all the edible masterpieces in this book.

Three years ago we were scared to work on anything bigger than a cupcake because we thought a full-sized cake would be too complicated, but as we practised we gained confidence and became brave enough to decorate a small cake, and now we're happy to tackle multi-tiered cakes. So we thought, in this book, we would also start small by decorating cupcakes, and by the end of it we hope that you too will find yourselves decorating towering cakes. We have also included five full-sized cake projects in this book, to show you how to apply your newly found piping skills on a bigger scale. Furthermore, we have showed how to pipe the flowers in clusters because this is a technique in itself. To pipe a single flower is easy, but to group them can be challenging – so we've got this covered for you.