Hydrangeas

I love hydrangeas.  If you can get the petals thin enough, they look positively radiant.  I have made hydrangeas once before for a competition.  It was a wedding cake that had hydrangeas and white roses on it.  That time I made 300 hydrangeas, all blue and all looking exactly the same.  I have learned since then, lol.  I have worked diligently to make my flowers so they look natural - not an easy feat for me!!!

I had originally planned to make 225 hydrangeas for this cake.  However.....given that I had soooooo many leftover from the other cake, and this cake has so many other flowers on it, I cut that number down to about 100.  We'll see how much is leftover, lol.   I have a feeling I have greatly over-estimated how many flowers this cake needs, but am not comfortable cutting any of the others out.

So, I started by making all 100 hydrangea centers.  I used an hydrangea center mold (made by First Impressions) for the centers.  I took a very small wire (28g or 30g is good) and made a small hook in the end of it.  I then crammed a small amount of white gumpaste into the center mold (I used the medium size), swiped the hook through some water and stuck it into the mold.  Pinched the mold around the wire and withdrew the center.  Twirled the center to make it clean where it met the wire and stuck it in a cup to dry.  It's much easier to put the hydrangea petals on when the centers are completely dried.

The plan is to have blue hydrangeas and white hydrangeas.  I may end up doing blue/white together, we will see.  I am also going to have hydrangea buds and leaves also.

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All the hydrangea flowers are finished!!!   They have not been dusted yet, that will wait for later, when some of the other flowers have been finished.   I have tried very hard to make them not all the same, and I am pretty pleased with how they turned out.

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The next step was to dust the hyrdrangeas, and watch them come to life in my very two hands!!

The color scheme for the hydrangeas is blue and white.  Originally, I was going to dust half of them blue, and leave the other half white.  Then I started thinking about it.........wouldn't it look nice to have blue AND white on the same hydrangea flower?????

So, I did some experimenting with colors, and found a few that I liked!   I recently took a dusting class at National Capital Area Cake Show (NCACS) with Ruth Rickey and learned a lot about dusting flowers.  In the past, I have only used one, maybe two, color(s) when dusting.  In the class I took, we used a minimum of 4 shades for each color we used.  So, I tried it on the flowers for this cake show.  HOLY MOLY!!!!!!!!   I thought my flowers were great before......now they are FANTASTIC!!!!!!!!!  I couldn't believe how real they looked when I was done!

For the hydrangeas, I ended up using 5 different shades of blue to dust them.  Here they are:

I used each color on the flower petals - half the hydrangeas had blue on the outside half of the petals, the other half had blue on the inside half of the petals.  Here are finished pictures of each type, along with a picture of them both together:

 

The pictures really do not do them justice - they were stunning to see in person!