Sugar flowers: how to make sweet peas

Following the calla lilies I made in my sugar flowers evening class I want to share with you the next type of flower we made - sweet peas. These are very pretty though fairly small, so would look good with one flower on top of a cupcake or with a spray on top of a larger cake.

Once again you need a dedicated cutter - or can make your own template, but this only cost a few pounds from Amazon.

To start, you need to roll out some flowerpaste so it is very thin and then cut a small teardrop-shaped piece either using a small rose petal cutter or your own template. Use a balling tool to curl the edges by placing the shape on a foam pad and rubbing the tool around the edge, half on the flowerpaste and half on the foam pad.

Take a piece of florist wire - quite thin, so 26 or 28 gauge - and make a small sausage shape from your sugarpaste. Insert the florist wire and then wrap the teardrop shape around it, folding in half. This will form the centre of the flower.

Cut out two pieces of flowerpaste using the sweet pea cutter.

Take the piece with the notch cut out (the top one in the above picture) and spread a little edible glue in the centre. Then, holding the cut out notch at the top line up the notch with the centre of your flower and wrap both side pieces around it, leaving an opening, like you can see below.

Take the other petal and rub the edges with a balling tool as before to curl them. Carefully insert a thin piece of florist wire - 30 gauge is good for this - into the petal. I found it quite hard to do this without the wire poking through - you can try making your flowerpaste petal a little thicker if you are having trouble.

Stand the petal behind the ones you have already made, and bind the two pieces of wire together with florist tape.

 We then made the calyx with a calyx cutter. You either need to roll this out on a board with holes - known as Mexican hat holes - or you can manually pinch together some of the flowerpaste to make the part that sticks up, as you can see here.

Slide the calyx up through the wires and bend the leaves outwards. I think a little bunch of these together could look quite realistic!