Rye Arts Festival Juliet Sear – Botanical Baking

Botany in baking is a hot trend in the culinary arts and a beautiful new book, Botanical Baking, is the first to focus on this pretty and delicious new concept inspired by the natural world.  This is the ultimate guide to stunning, creative and never-before-seen cake decoration that will wow friends and family.  With 360,000 posts on Instagram for #edibleflowers and certain supermarkets beginning to stock them on their shelves, the demand for beautiful botanicals in the kitchen is only going to keep on blooming.

Juliet is one of the UK’s leading cakeologists and food stylists; regularly appearing on TV, in magazines, vlogs, blogs, social media campaigns and radio. Over the years she has made edible creations for thousands of people, including many celebrities such as Sir Ian McKellen, Bryan Adams, Prince Harry and Kate Moss.

Having built a reputation for creativity and innovation Juliet makes impressive and challenging cakes but her no-nonsense, down to earth approach makes her creations accessible to the home baker. She is a very approachable and highly entertaining teacher.

She is a regular presenter on ITV’s This Morning show and, for the second-year running, she designed and created the edible animated characters for Channel 4’s Great British Bake Off for their TV, social and print media advertising campaigns.

Juliet writes and styles sweet and savoury features for food magazines such as BBC Good Food, and her work is regularly featured in the press including the Daily Telegraph and Hello. She has written four successful books.

She also works with major International brands such as the BBC, Cadbury, Dr Oteker, Kitchen Aid and Marc Jacobs and was previously the UK Ambassador for Cake Boss.

Juliet Sear, shows you exactly how to use edible flowers, herbs and botanicals in your cakes and bakes.  She begins with an overview of which flowers are edible and great for flavour as well as how to use, preserve, store and apply them including pressing, drying and crystallising flowers and petals. Juliet then walks you step-by-step through the creation of 30 beautiful botanical cakes that showcase edible flowers and herbs. The bakes include more top trends such as a confetti cake, a cupcake wreath, a gin and tonic cake, floral chocolate bark, a semi-naked cake, caketails (cocktails made of cake!) and more.

Recipes range from sweet treats like Edible Flower Lollies to teatime desserts like Rose and Lychee Cake and Apple Blossom Cake, through to showstopping celebration cakes including a Flowerfetti cake and a Blousy Blooms Swag Cake which has large edible flowers arranged in swags around the top edge of each tier.

With thanks to Paul & Rebecca Webbe for hosting and supporting this event on behalf of Rye Arts Festival.