How To Make A Rose With Icing

Want to make a cake that's a real show-off piece? Here's how to create a rose from icing to top it. By Kirstie Allsopp

'If you ask me, no party’s complete without a cake to eat. Like a lot of people, I love to bake when I’m at home, but the most cake decoration I've ever done is a slap of sugar frosting. But, in the last episode of Kirstie's Homemade Home, Mich Turner taught me to decorate cakes - one craft that everyone should be able to try. In this step by step guide, I'll show you how you can make mini cakes look like masterpieces with hand made roses.'

A plastic sleeve (the sort you get in stationery shops)
Sugarpaste
Edible glitter
Royal icing
Nozzle-less piping bag (you could use a sandwich bag)
Small knife to cut the sugarpaste
Sieve to dust the glitter
... and nimble fingers

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Skill

Easy. And you can always eat the bits that go wrong!

Budget

Under a fiver. Sugarpaste costs approx £2 per 250g and edible glitter approx £2.50 per 1.5g tub. If you make your own royal icing it will cost just a few pence.

Time

A couple of hours... depending on how much you eat as you're going along!

Step One: Roll Up The Sugarpaste

First you'll need some sugarpaste. You can buy this ready coloured, or you can colour it yourself. Rip a little piece off – it’s quite sticky - and roll it into a sausage. Slice the sausage into six little circles.

Step Two: Squish The Sugarpaste Into Petals

Lay your circles out on the bottom sheet of a plastic sleeve, covering them with the top sheet. Squish them down once with the palm of your hand and give them a quick smooth over with your thumb to make one side of the circle slightly thinner than the other. These will be your petals.

Step Three: Curl A Petal To Create The Rose Centre

Lift the plastic back and look for the smallest one that you’ve created, to be the centre of your rose. Using one finger, carefully rub it from the blunt end. If you're gentle, it should stay in one piece as it comes off and it should automatically put a nice curl in the petal. Hold it between your thumb and finger and then gently, starting on one side, curl it right up over itself to form the centre of the rose.

Step Four: Add The Other Petals

Now take your second petal from the sheeting and lay it over your finger. Lay the first petal in the centre of the second one, join side down. As you squeeze the second one around, it will form the next petal. Curl the tip down and then pinch around the sides to keep it together. Continue in this way with more petals until you have a convincing looking rose.

Step Five: Dust It With Glitter

Now comes the fun part - because we get to dust it down with glitter. Just dust it over your rose using a sieve (a sugar sieve, if you have one) and it will stay nice and encrusted.

Step Six: Prepare The Piping Bag

Next, we're going to make the leaves on which to pop your rose. Fill a piping bag with royal icing and, instead of using a nozzle, just cut a V shape off at the end of the bag. This will allow you to pipe a leaf shape because, as you'll see in the next step, the pointed centre of the V will draw a line, forming the central 'vein' of your leaf - and the icing will splay out either side, forming the leaf's 'blades'.

Step Seven: Create The Leaves

Squeezing gently, drag the piping bag towards yourself, pushing back every couple of millimetres to make the leaf wavy. At the end of the leaf, stop squeezing, stop pushing and just pull the bag away from the cake gently. This will make a point at the end of your leaf.