So sorry for the lack of posts, but life has been quite crazy lately.  Besides the fact that I am currently sitting on my couch in miserable pain from strep throat (which added to the lack of posts), last week I had the pleasure of taking a 3-day class from Ron Ben-Israel at Caljava International School here in California.  I only take one or two of these types of classes per year since they are quite costly and so when I heard that Ron Ben-Israel, one of New York’s top cake artists, was teaching I knew I had to go.  So thankfully my mom and dad gave me half the money for the class for my Christmas present and I was able to come up with the rest.  You should definitely check out this schools website…they have top-notch teachers like Bronwen Weber, Kerry Vincent, and Colette Peters, among many others. Students come from all over the world to take these classes and they are clearly worth it.

This particular class by Ron Ben-Israel focused on learning how to do different types of sugar bows, sweet pea sugar flowers, and working with a monochromatic color scheme.  I will be posting throughout the week on this class, but this first post is going to show the beginning stages of the sweet pea sugar flowers and how we prepared for designing our cake.

We first had to randomly pick our color that we could do our cake in…I got yellow, which I was pretty happy about.  Ron went over how he makes his own sugar paste and how he stores and wraps it so it stays fresh.

Then we looked at some of the previous cakes that Ron had made that incorporated his sugar bows and tried to come up with a design for our cake.  

I actually came up with two different cake designs, but in the end I really didn’t stick to either of them completely.  But here is my picture of my original idea for my cake…

Well, onto the sweet pea sugar flowers!  Ron came up with his own design for a sweet pea sugar flower cutter and that is what we used.  I believe that you can buy them at Caljava, but I am not certain.  He said he still might want to make some adjustments to the cutters in the future, but one great thing about this is that you just have to use one cutter for the whole flower.  I am going to show you the step by step photos of me making the sugar flowers, but of course they will not explain completely how to make them and to give instructions online would be quite tedious, so if you want to learn how to make sugar flowers I would recommend either taking a class, buying a DVD on sugar flowers, or buying a sugar flower book.  I hope you enjoy the eye candy though! Sadly most of the photos from this class had to be taken down due to complaints about giving away too much information.  

Those were some photos from Ron’s demonstration, but here are my photos from making them myself.

**Photos had to be taken down…sorry

Once the flowers are done you hang them upside down so they will dry properly.  After they dried we colored them with petal dust…but I will save those photos for another post!

Hope you enjoyed the photos and make sure and check out Caljava’s and Ron Ben-Israel’s websites!