Decorating Your DIY Wedding Cake With Sugar Flowers

You Don't Have to be Martha to Make a Fantastic DIY Wedding Cake: Buy Sugar Flowers to Make DIY Cake Decorating Easier

Sugar flowers on wedding cakes
Image from Martha Stewart Weddings

What I know in Hindsight: Decorating a wedding cake is hard unless you're a trained cake baker. I had big plans for my DIY wedding cake. I started making test cakes early and was sure I could master Martha's DIY Monogrammed Cake instructions. I ended up feeling like a Cake Wreck candidate. I could not get the royal icing to slide off the parchment paper without breaking.

Black and White Poppy Sugar Flower
Image from Sweetdejavu on Etsy

I not only experienced failure with royal frosting monograms, but also failure with buttercream decorations, and only modest success with royal icing flowers. But not enough success to want 100 people looking at my modest cake. I wanted a showpiece, bit I didn't have the decorating skills to pull it off. So I bought feather butterflies to decorate my cake a-la Martha. Buying sugar blossoms make cake decorating easier and gives your DIY wedding cake a polished look.

Hydrangea Sugar Flowers
Image by SweetPetalBakery on Etsy

Sugar flower decorations can run between $20 and a couple of hundred dollars. But you don't need a lot of sugar flowers. Go for understated elegance with a small Hydrangea topper (pictured above) or a few dogwood branches here and there. A little can go a long way.

A collection of sugar flowers

Images clockwise from top left: Poppy Cake by SweetPetalBakery, Dogwood Blooms by SweetPetalBakery, Red Ranunculus by SweetPetalBakery, Daisy Cake by Martha Stewart Weddings, and Red Poppies by SweetDeJaVu