How we make a sugar rose, petal by petal

The roses on our wedding cakes look as if they were picked that morning, but each one is made by hand over several days from gum paste, a sugar dough that dries hard and thin. A three-tier cake with a cascade of flowers carries 12 to 15 roses and around 200 petals in total.

It starts with the centre. Swathi, who does most of our flower work, rolls a small cone of gum paste onto a hooked wire and lets it dry overnight. The next day she rolls the paste so thin you can almost read through it, cuts petals with metal cutters in three sizes, and thins the edges with a ball tool on a foam pad so they ripple like real petals.

The first five petals are wrapped tightly around the cone. The next layers are cupped over a spoon to dry, then attached in rings of five, each ring a little more open. A full rose has 15 to 20 petals and takes about 40 minutes of hands-on work, not counting drying time.

Colour is added at the end with powder dusts brushed into the centre and along the edges, which gives a soft shading no painted colour can match. The finished flowers are stored in a box with silica gel, since moisture is their enemy, especially in the monsoon. On the wedding morning, the roses are arranged on the cake in the venue, not in the studio, so they travel safely. They are edible but quite hard, and most couples keep one as a memento. Kept dry, a sugar rose lasts for years.