When using fresh flowers on a wedding cake, make sure that the stems aren’t inserted directly into the cake, because they’re dirty, and because they can possibly drip fluid from the stems into the cake.
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This cake had a piped lace pattern and a topper made from fresh flowers.
These were prepared and had wrapped stems, and the topper was in an arrangement in a plastic holder.
A fairly common style when I was making wedding cakes was the classic “pearls and swirls,” with fondant pearls around the base of the tiers.
This wedding cake was hexagonal and had silver pearls around the base, which made it a little unusual.
The fresh flower arrangement on the topper was a pop of color that contrasted with the monochrome of the icing design.
To see wedding cakes with gumpaste flowers, click here.
For this cake, I was thinking that the bride was going to be leaving a monogram topper at the reception site for me, but the site coordinator brought me an arrangement of fresh roses instead.
Not only was it not what I was expecting, but it was in a white cup that had a piece of oasis and a bunch of water in it.
The cup looked like it was a plastic cup that had been cut off to hold the oasis, and if I put it on top of the cake it would have been totally visible.
I mean, two inches of cheap white plastic sitting on top of the cake and not hidden by any greenery visible.
So I did what any self-respecting person would do, and I took the arrangement apart.
Apologies to the florist, but seriously, floral arrangements in little containers rarely look well-proportioned when they’re placed on top of cakes.
I had some extra roses when I was done with the top tier, so I put the extra petals around the base of the cake. And the problem was solved.
When you’re using fresh flowers on a cake, let the florist prepare a topper in a dish, like the one that florist Mona Ray did here.
Also, it’s generally better to let the baker put the flowers on the cake, not anyone else.
We’re trained in food safety (or should be) and will know what flowers are safe to use on cakes, and how to put them on the cake without sticking the stems into the cake itself.
I recently had a cake that was going to have fresh flowers on it.
When I arrived at the reception site they hadn’t arrived, so the coordinator called the florist.
They said that they were going to send everything over later, and that the florist would put them on the cake.
That makes me nervous, because who knows what the florist was told about how the bride wanted the cake done?
Luckily, the delivery person arrived with everything and was more than happy to let me decorate the cake.
Good thing, too, because the flowers included hydrangea (toxic) and hyacinth (toxic).
So instead of putting the hydrangea all over the cake like you see in wedding magazines and photo shoots (bad, bad photo shoots, giving brides lots of bad ideas) I put them around the base of the cake, but none of them touched the cake itself.
(Read this article about using gumpaste hydrangeas as a better option!)
The flowers that went on the cake had big blobs of icing on them used as glue, so there were no stems inserted into the cake.
I also took some of the hyacinths and stuck them inside the rose petals so that they were on the layers but didn’t come anywhere near the cake itself.
Just be careful when using real flowers…The likelihood of someone getting sick from them is low, but you never know.
My rule is, if I don’t want to eat the flowers, then I don’t want to stick them into the cake, either.
