Decorating Cheese Wedding Cakes ... The Paper Way

We were out doing a show recently, and I got into a conversation with someone who was interested in the stand - and it turned out she lived just up the road. "What do you do?" I asked, after we'd been talking for a bit.

"I'm a paper florist", was the reply.

Well, as Bee Watson of Wild Hive says herself - "a paper florist? Who even knew that was a job?" - it's certainly not something most of us have heard of. But it sounded interesting, so a little later on Bee and I met up for a chat, with some of her beautiful creations on hand. And they really are beautiful! Made from thick Italian crepe, they're all shapes and sizes, in a range of stunning colours and sometimes with foliage too. If you need convincing, take a look at the Wild Hive shop, here. See what I mean?

Don't think of these as merely imitation flowers, because actually they have their own special quality, due in particular to the beautiful crinkly texture of the paper, which becomes more obvious and more striking the closer you get.

Bee, a former set and customer designer, came across paper flowers as something that had really taken off in the US - for weddings in particular. Over a period, she developed the techniques of making them and, when the time was right Wild Hive was born: she'll be doing her level best to see that paper flowers take off over here too - and I bet they will.

Straight away I was thinking about their potential for decorating cheese wedding cakes. Because it seemed to me this could be an exciting new alternative to the usual options (mainly flowers and soft fruit). So last week we got together at Bee's beautiful studio perched on the edge of Dartmoor to try this out, with two of our best-selling off-the-peg cakes, the Dartington (feeds 100-110) and St Agnes (feeds 40-50). And what fun that was! A morning spent playing and experimenting leading to - I hope you'll agree - rather stunning results.

So what do you think? Is there a future for paper flowers as a means of decorating cheese wedding cakes? And should we be offering Wild Hive decoration packs to go with our cheese cakes?