Decorate your Christmas treats with poinsettia flowers and your Christmas tree with home-made candy canes. Here's how.
Poinsettia flowers
You will need a flower-shaped cutter (or, cut out a flower shape on a piece of paper and use it as a stencil).
1. Lightly dust your work surface with icing sugar and roll out ready-made red fondant icing until it’s 2mm thick.
2. Using the stencil, cut out 3 flower shapes with a sharp knife (or use a cutter). Brush the centre of one of the flower shapes with a little water and place a second flower shape on top, rotated slightly. Repeat with the third flower shape to make a poinsettia.
3. Press down the centre to make a shallow well. Moisten, then fill with a few small gold sugar balls. Move to a flat, icing sugar-dusted surface to dry.
Holly leaves
1. Roll out green fondant and cut out holly shapes with a leaf cutter. Roll small balls of red fondant for berries.
Recommended cake decoration suppliers:
For sugar pastes, edible food colourings, icings, glitters and other decorations, go to the Squires Shop website (0845 225 5671) or Jane Asher (020 7584 6177). For cake cutters of all shapes and sizes, as well as all kinds of cake cases, glitters and sparkles, visit Splat Cooking (0870 766 8290).
Candy canes
1. Take small amounts of red and white fondant icing. On a surface lightly dusted with icing sugar, roll each of the colours out to form snakes about 5mm thick.
2. Twist the two coloured snakes around each other, then lightly roll them together with the tips of your fingers until they form one stripy, red and white snake.
3. Cut into 4cm-long pieces and shape into candy canes. Leave to dry on the dusted work surface.