Sculpting with buttercream
It’s taken me a long time and LOTS of practice to become confident with sculpting flowers with buttercream. Originally inspired by the work of Russian sculpture artists, led by the talented Evgenia Ermilova, who work with a type of plaster paste to create decorative floral clocks and so on, I started playing around with different palette knives, learning how to collect the buttercream onto the knife and apply it to the surface of the cake to create different petal and leaf shapes.
Other cake makers were doing the same, and now it’s pretty much changed buttercream cake decoration for good. But what’s so good about this technique and why should you give it a go?
Before you start on a cake, practice creating different petal and leaf shapes on a flat surface
It enables you to create flowers with more volume on the side of a cake than you could achieve with piping. Piped flowers are beautiful, but adhering them to the side of a cake is challenging, as they are heavy and inclined to fall off. Piping directly onto the side of a cake is easy enough if you’re creating flat-faced flowers like daisies and anemones but very difficult when it comes to fuller blooms like roses and peonies. Sculpting allows you to create these more voluminous shapes without fear of them falling off….most of the time anyway.
Your flowers will have more character. No two sculptors create the same shapes, even with the same training and equipment. The way you wield a knife will impose your own style on the shapes you form, and as you get more confident this will grow quickly. In a crowded market, standing out with individuality and a distinctive look to your cakes is crucial if you are to build a presence on social media.
Combining sculpted flowers with piped and painted elements adds depth and a painterly appeal
3. Sculpted flowers can be combined with piped and painted elements to create depth and movement. Piped flowers can look a bit too delicate and realistic to mix in with sculpted flowers, which are a little more abstract and impressionistic, but if you include some painted details and stop your sculpted flowers from becoming too bulky by keeping a fine edge, you can achieve a painterly layered effect. A bit like arranging real flowers against a floral printed backdrop.
The emerging buds of these wisteria clusters are painted, while the more developed flowers are sculpted with a lot of buttercream to create volume
4. Sculpting flowers at different stages of development and from different angles is easy. Piped flowers can look a bit uniform, even in the most skilled hands. Once you get accomplished with a palette knife, you’ll be able to create groups of flowers with wonderful movement and narrative.
Practice sculpting flowers at different stages of development and from different angles.
5. It’s quick and creates less clearing up! Not the most artistic consideration, but decorating a three tier wedding cake with piped flowers will require the use of umpteen piping bags and tips, nails, lifters, greaseproof squares and freezing trays, all of which require scraping clean before washing (NEVER wash buttercream down the sink, ever) or must be thrown away, adding to landfill. Palette knife sculpting simply requires a board and a knife pretty much. Even when it comes to mixing colours, I often do this on the board as well. So much easier to create a beautiful design when you don’t have huge mountains of mess piling up around you!!