Mountain Laurel

A fellow cake enthusiast was creating a cake for her full time employer. Mary works at a Pennsylvania State facility and the state flower is Mountain Laurel.

Start with an 18 gauge wire and four double tipped white stamen with a small seed head.  Bend the stamen in half and insert the wire and bend your wire as pictured. 

Tape the stamen and wire.

Using tweezers, bend each stamen.  It should look like an umbrella rib.

Using Christmas Red airbrush color, carefully paint just the tip of the seed head and set aside to throughly dry.

This is the medium petunia flower cutter used to cut very thin gumpaste.

Turn the paste over, and using a veining tool, gently score the petal as pictured.

 Again turn your petal to the top, you can see the scores made to the back of the petals.

Now you need to score the center of each petal on the face of the flower.

This give the flower a very distinct pattern

Using red airbrush color and a fine paint brush, paint in the star and then 

paint the center of the star with green.

Finally, insert the stamen and place in a cupping form to finish drying.

This flower grows in groupings on a large bush which has long slender leafs.