Edible Flowers

Inside Bay Area:

Jan Loomis calls herself a hobbyist cake decorator, but she is nothing short of an artist.

Instead of using clay and paint, she uses the not-so-pretty-sounding medium of gum paste. Loomis flattens the sugar, tylose powder and egg white mixture and deftly sculpts it into hydrangeas, poppies, roses, lilac, blackberries and peonies.

When dry, she uses a colored, edible powder to paint each flower, leaf and berry a realistic hue, even using the tip of a pin to paint the inside details of her sculpted cymbidium orchids.

None of the flowers, berries, ferns or leaves in her bouquets are “real.” They never sprouted from a seed or grew in the earth, but her creations are so realistic in appearance, you almost can smell them.

At first, Loomis relied on the Internet for close-up pictures of the flowers she wanted to recreate. When that failed to provide the level of detail as she wanted, she began visiting local nurseries and buying flowers. She sits the flower beside her as she works, studying it’s structure and even dissecting it for a closer look.

“I cut it apart and really examine it,” she says. Then, she says, she takes moulds of petals and stems so she can recreate them as accurately as possible.

The finished flowers will be on display for weeks, if not months, at her home or office.

Her roses take up to 10 minutes to make. Her rose buds can take three hours. Her flower basket, holding a variety of flowers, berries and leaves, took about 30 hours to produce. She’ll spend about four hours decorating one cookie. She even brushes her miniature dragonflies, which decorate her fondant cakes, with 24-carat gold powder. It’s an expensive accoutrement, but she simply loves the way it looks.

Often, people she gives cookies or cakes to refuse to eat them.

“They say ‘It looks too good to eat,’” she says with a laugh, adding that she’ll return to friends’ homes to whom she has given cookies and they are on display rather than munched. In fact, “It Looks Too Good To Eat” is the name of the book she is writing on cookie decoration.

Loomis works in the positively uncreative field of emergency medicine. She always liked making cakes for her children’s birthday parties and got really good at it, she says. Then, about five years ago, shows on the Food Network piqued her interest and she began working more seriously with gum paste, reading as much as she could about tricks and techniques.

“I can, apparently, read instructions pretty well,” she says.