In this gumpaste acorn tutorial you’ll learn how to make an quick and easy addition to your fall sugar flower arrangement that lends a wonderfully authentic look to your cake design.
Pair them with some oak leaves from our gumpaste fall leaves tutorial and you have a completed spray for you cake.
Gumpaste Acorn Tutorial: Materials
- Gumpaste in two shades – a darker brown and a lighter brown
- 22 or 24-guage green or brown wires cut into quarters
- Needle-nosed pliers
- Bone tone
- Sugarcraft tweezers or sharp knife
- Confectioner’s glaze or leaf glaze
Gumpaste Acorn Tutorial: How-To
To make the acorn nut or center, roll a small piece of dark brown gumpaste into an oval shape roughly the size of a small grape, then lengthen a little into a small log shape.
To make the “cup” part of the acorn, roll a ball of gumpaste (half the size of a grape) and hollow out the center with a bone tool. Rather than doing this on a flat surface, do it in a cupped hand so the “cup” doesn’t end up flat at the bottom. Then use your fingers to work the sizes of the paste up a little more so it covers roughly one third of the nut. Sit the nut into the cup to test it out for size and if satisfactory, use edible glue to stick it into place.
Next take one of your pieces of wire and dip the end into edible glue, wiping off the excess. Insert into the base of the acorn and slide it all the way to the top until the wire just peeps out at the other end.
Then sing a tweezers, pinch little ridges on the surface of the cup to create texture. If you don’t have a sugarcraft tweezers, use the pointed end of a sharp knife to create little “flicks” of gumpaste for texture.
If you wish you can dust the cup with a light brown/dark beige dust color and dust the top of the nut and down the sides a little with a darker brown. Then steam to set the color.
Finally brush the nut with confectioner’s glaze or leaf glaze to bring up the shine and leave to dry.
