https://www.cutoutandkeep.net/projects/sweet-trees-4 • Posted by Crafta La Vista
Cooking a meal for your special someone - Do something different for dessert with these sweet trees. they are the perfect centre piece Check out my blog for details on where I source my materials!
Cooking a meal for your special someone - Do something different for dessert with these sweet trees. they are the perfect centre piece Check out my blog for details on where I source my materials!
I started by making the filling for the pot. Now you can buy something like plater of paris, but I went for the cheap option and make some salt dough - this takes longer to dry out but I made it using things I found round the house so didn't need to spend a penny. To make this (for 2 plant pots) use: 200g of flour 100g of salt few dashes of red food colouring and as much water as you need to make this into a dough texture (less than 1/2 a cup)
Take your pot and fill it with the dough, leaving a gap at the top as it will rise slightly
Cover your piece of wooden dowelling in ribbon, gluing it as you go so it stays in place
Put the dowelling through the middle of the dough until it reaches the bottom. At this point I took it back out and put some hot glue on the bottom of the hole before putting the dowelling back in for extra sturdiness I then left my pot next to a heater overnight to dry out the salt dough, but if you have something like an airing cupboard than that works very well
Once your salt dough is keeping the dowelling sturdy in the pot, you can glue your loveheart sweets round the outside of the pot
Take your polystyrene ball and push it onto the top of the dowelling Again, I took mine back off and added some hot glue into the hole before putting it back on
Cover the ball in tissue and tie it tight round the bottom of the ball
Now this is where you need to make a choice. you can either stick your sweets on with cocktail sticks or melted chocolate If you are using cocktail sticks then leave the tissue paper as is. However I tried using cocktail sticks but the maltesers kept breaking when I tried to put them on so I opted for melted chocolate instead This meant I had to cut the tissue off the ball but I left the frilly bit of the tissue on the bottom as an extra decoration
I melted some plain chocolate and spread it all over the ball, including the bottom To reach the bottom I had to push the remaining tissue down When you start placing your sweets on you might notice them slipping down the ball - this means the chocolate is too thin. If this happens then leave the chocolate to harden up a bit and then try again. You can also put a bit extra chocolate on the bottom of your sweet to give it something extra to stick to
Repeat the process until you have covered the whole ball with your sweets For this one I cut the maltesers in half before sticking them on so that you got the two tone effect
Once you have made 1 you will be addicted so try out different sweets and patterns and have all your friends and family drooling