Fondant Roses (or How to Make Something Frickin' Awesome With No Skill At All)

For the last month or so the blog has been pretty cake-centric. This is really odd for me for a few reasons, the first of which being that I usually get bored of making something after the second or third time. The second reason being that I don't like cake. Plain old white or chocolate cake just doesn't cut it for me. Maybe it's the generic texture that never varies from one cake to the next, or maybe it's just that I will choose a flaky pastry with fruit or custard filling any day over a fat slice of flour, sugar, eggs, and oil. And butter. Lots and lots of butter (not that there's anything wrong with butter, not at all, I just try to limit my butter intake to a mere pound a week--something that's not possible when making a cake).

That all being said, through the Wilton cake course I've been taking I've learned tons about piping and molding and sculpting sugar that I never would have even considered attempting on my own.

Take these fondant roses for example. They look beautiful if I do say so myself (or at least most of them do... there was some minor wiltage when I attempted to make a bunch of them in the sun. FYI sugar melts in the sun). The surprising part about these flowers wasn't how simple they were to make (note how I say "simple" and not "easy"), but how cathartic and relaxing the whole process was. Sometimes simple repetition gets old and stale fast, in this case however, meticulously molding each petal and working with each imperfection (instead of against them) to create something beautiful and unique was rewarding in a calm and muted sort of way.

I've never been any sort of artist. Even in the loosest most general form of the word it's difficult to consider myself that way. However I could definitely continue to make these types of things without any difficulty at all.

I read something once that said, "we are perfect in our imperfection". I think that's why I enjoyed making these flowers so much. The ones with the greatest imperfections turned out looking the best and the most realistic (with a few truly awful exceptions. Seriously. Some of them in no way resembled... anything). Knowing that really keeps the pressure off. When it comes to a lot of things actually.