Quick & Easy Gumpaste Pansy Tutorial

Gumpaste pansy tutorial on Cake-Geek.com, part of the quick and easy sugar flowers collection

This gumpaste pansy tutorial only takes minutes and the flowers make the most exquisite floral finishing touch to lots of cakes and bakes, from layer cakes to loaf tin cakes to tray bakes. While fresh pansies are an edible flower, it’s always handy to have a box of these gumpaste pansies to hand for when you can’t get fresh pansies or they’re out of season. In any case, I find the fresh pansies are quite large for small cakes whereas the size created in this gumpaste pansy tutorial suits almost all cake and bake sizes.

And don’t forget pansies come in a variety of different shades – I’ve chosen a combination of purple and yellow petals in this tutorial, but you can go with all purple with dust of dab of yellow petal dust in the centre, or a combination of purple and white petals or all three colours.

Another point of note is that the purple shade of fresh pansies is a much deeper shade than the colour that can be created coloring gumpaste with purple gel color unless you can find pre-colored purple gumpaste in your local cake decorating store.

Materials

Half inch (1.5cm) petal cutter or circle cutter (eg. the end of a piping tip)
Gumpaste
Purple gel paste, yellow gel paste
Foam pad
Ball tool or bone tool
Sugarcraft drying foam or small flower former (or egg carton or shape a small flower former from aluminium foil/tin foil)
Edible glue
Yellow petal dust
Black petal dust and a very fine paintbrush OR very fine tipped black edible pen

Method

Color some gumpaste purple, and some yellow.
Using the petal/circle cutter, cut out three purple petals and two yellow petals.

Gumpaste pansy tutorial on Cake-Geek.com, cutting out the circle shapes for the petals

3. Place the petals on the foam pad and using your ball tool or bone tool, press firmly on the outer edge of the petals to thin and frill the edges slightly.

Gumpaste pansy tutorial on Cake-Geek.com, thinning the edges of the petals with a bone tool

4. Next, place the first purple petal in one of the wells of your drying foam/flower former and dab some edible glue on the bottom one third of the petal.

Gumpaste pansy tutorial on Cake-Geek.com, adding the first petal to the former

5. Add another purple petal on top of the first petal, one on the right and one on the left, as shown.

Gumpaste pansy tutorial on Cake-Geek.com, adding the second and third petals

6. Dab some edible glue on the bottom right quadrant of the left hand side petal and on the bottom left quadrant of the right hand side petal. Add two yellow petals as shown below. Then dab some yellow petal dust in the centre of the flower.

Gumpaste pansy tutorial on Cake-Geek.com, adding the fourth and fifth petals plus a dab of yellow in the center

7. Finally, using your black edible ink pen or fine paintbrush and black petal dust, add some black lines radiating out from the center of the flower. And voila – you have a perfect quick and easy gumpaste pansy to add a pretty finishing touch to your cakes and bakes!