How To Decorate Cakes With Real Flowers

Make me a simple, unaffected cake (or three) decorated with nature’s own ornamentation.

EASY & AWESOME | In food TV land, cake decorating has been out of control since 2006 when “Ace of Cakes” débuted on the Food Network. The runaway success of this reality program inspired legions of pastry chefs and bakers across North America to seek TV fame by constructing crazy, teetering cakes—the more outrageous the better—on shows such as “Cake Boss,” “Wedding Cake Wars” and “Ultimate Cake Off.”

All of this excess is enough to make anyone pine for plain cake, simply iced and decorated naturally with real wildflowers and herbs. Here are three of our favourite cakes topped in this beautiful, natural way.

The white flowers and green leaves on the cake pictured above are common wood sorrel (Oxalis acetosella), an edible forest herb. They were put there by  Lakashmi at purevege.com, an amazing and amazingly beautiful vegetarian food blog produced in Finland. Wood sorrel is sharp tasting and most often used in salads or for pesto; Lakashmi used it here to top an unusual savory cake (CLICK HERE for her recipe).

Wood sorrel is just one example of edible wildflowers found in nature. CLICK HERE for a great list of other ones found in the Pacific Northwest.

Could there be anything more spectacular than woodland violets scattered on top of a simple, layered dessert? Ardent blogger Ashley English, author of the well-received cookbook A Year of Pies, produced this sweet for Design Sponge last year. It was part of a post on cooking with spring wildflowers that included tried-and-true tips for safely gathering edibles (CLICK HERE to for the post; CLICK HERE to visit English’s website, smallmeasure.com).

No, birds did not track across this cake from Honor & Folly, though the few rosemary sprigs cleverly tossed across its top make it look at bit like they did. What a dead simple and graphically compelling cake decorating idea.

Honor & Folly is a small-scale design-focussed inn, shop and cooking school in Detroit, Michigan. CLICK HERE to see all of the interesting things they have to offer visitors. —Annabel Lee