I promised my kids we could make buttercream flowers. I knew I could make the frosting, but I went to look for tips and nails and didn’t have any! Where did they go? (It is entirely possible they were lost in the fire six years ago, I still look for things I used to have, even though we’ve moved.) I was able to obtain some frosting tips with a quick trip local, but no nails. Nails are helpful because they allow 360 degree access to the construction of the flower. If you watch someone making a frosting rose, most likely they are using a flower nail.

Hot glue to the rescue. I cut 1.5” circles from a cardboard box, cut down bamboo skewers, and hot glued the stick to the circle, with an extra circle of glue around the bamboo for good measure.

To use them, we put a dot of frosting on the head of the nail, then applied a square of parchment paper. (Paper cutters are great for making lots of small squares.) The flowers were constructed on the paper so they could be easily slid off and popped in the freezer.

Oh my goodness did the kids have fun making these. We filled up the whole freezer drawer! I did order some washable metal flowers nails, since this is very much a repeatable activity, which we repeated the following week.

The second time around we experimented with color. We split the buttercream into four parts, and colored some red, blue, and yellow, and left the fourth portion uncolored. Each frosting bag we loaded with multiple colors. The favorite bag had all three primary colors dolloped on the sides, with white down the middle. This makes great unicorn poop (above the blue star in the picture below). As we reached the ends of the bags, the blue and yellow had combined to green, and the pink and yellow had combined to orange, but these two made adorable little blooming cacti (far right middle in the photo below). Happy discovery!