Vintage Wedding: Sugar Buttons

Here's a quick and sexy shot of what I'm working on this week: An assortment of 700+ sugar buttons. The wedding colors are gold and pale pink with accents of this deep blue, and these buttons will eventually adorn a four-tier pink velvet cake filled with three-berry buttercream.

These buttons are a labor of love and have been so fun to make. Yes, I'm a little insane to enjoy what others might find maddeningly tedious, but there are so many ways to make new and interesting buttons, I couldn't help myself.

Some were cut with aspic cutters (tiny), some were molded, some imprinted, and some were hand-shaped, like the little pillow-shapes you see here.

We have access to a lot of great buttons here to use for reference, but not a lot of deeply textured ones, so I after a long search I found several perfect ones and had them shipped from Thailand, then made molds of them. You see them here as the largest gold button and the top-most gold button with the rose in the center.

I also discovered an edible shine liquid thanks to the fine folks at Divine Specialties in Woodland Hills. It took some hunting online to find it, but it adds the perfect touch. All the buttons will have a gloss shine on them when I'm done, lending to the trompe l'oeil effect. Here's a pic of the shiny vs. unshiny effect. What do you think?

When the buttons are finally in place on the cake sides, I'll pipe fine gold thread looping and trailing in and out of the buttons around the cake. I'll post pics as soon as the cake is done -- can't wait to see it complete!!