Sugar Flowers (Twenty to Make)
Make lifelike flowers from gumpaste and royal icing with help from this book for use on your cakes and other baked goodies, from lilies and roses to orchids. The book is small in dimension but has a lot of content. The book is concise with 20 different flowers to make as the title suggests, ranging from using specialist sugarcraft cutters to piping nozzles. There are diagrams for each step, which help visualise the instructions and make it easier to follow. In addition to making the flowers, there are display options for each flower type. The results are stunning if not a little intimidating, but by jumping straight in and practising, you can find that your results can be just as good.-Popular Crafts My first sugarcraft project was making a rose out of fondant icing, and this craft does lend itself to the fashioning of floral items.  Here is a whole book of different flowers and arrangements to create out of sugar to decorate cakes, tables and more. There is a recipe for royal icing in here, short and sweet (pardon the pun) but you will need to look elsewhere for recipes for other types of frosting such as gum paste.  You can buy them ready made of course, and this book gets instantly down the business of telling you exactly what you need to make the projects and then there are the projects themselves.  There are twenty of these of course, each one taking up two pages.  There are written instructions, a picture of the finished item attractively presented to inspire you, and best of all in my opinion a helpful page showing what the component parts look like before assembly.  This takes much of the mystery out of creating these beautiful flowers, and on the same page is a small inset photograph of a completed item, but not actually presented in as full a way as in the main picture.  I find this staged approach very helpful, and it is surprising how little space you need to lay out a project in this manner.  Choose from the inevitable roses, simple daisies, glorious bright gerbera, cheerful daffodils, elegant orchids, buds, leaves and even a butterfly to enhance your work.  Substitute the frostings for polymer clay and you extend the use of the book - one for the keeper shelf that shows how easy it really is to make very professional looking sugar flowers.-Myshelf.com