My grandmother learned to make sugar flowers because of a rose that looked more like a cabbage than a rose. My mother, her daughter had brought it home from school. Eileen turned it over in her hand and didn't laugh — she wondered. That wondering is everything we still do here thanks to my grandmother Eileen Margaret Brace "pondering beauty".
A journey of learning and discovery
From that small moment, Eileen embarked on a journey of learning and discovery which would see her attending the Riverstone Night School, held on the grounds of the local high school, to study Cake Decorating. Over three years she learned multiple skills that saw her love of the craft grow, and soon she was asked by the teacher to take over teaching the skill herself.
The garden on Castlereagh Street
Eileen's love and eye for botanical detail grew from her own garden in Castlereagh Street, and she spent as many hours tending her floral cottage garden as she did creating icing replicas at her workbench.
Her garden pride was a frangipani tree that graced her front porch. She would spend many hours noting the delicate curves and slight folds of the petals, how they swept inwards towards a twisted centre and formed the stem. She marvelled at the beauty of the flowers, and spent many months perfecting icing replicas that were barely detectable from the real thing.
"You couldn't tell that the flower wasn't real."
The guilds — Sydney & the Golden West
Over the following decade Eileen would become a member of the Sydney arm of the Cake Decorators Guild of NSW, where she made friends and shared her innate crafty abilities with fellow guild members. She continued honing her skills by teaching and by being an avid student of the craft, and one of her mentors and teachers was Mrs Oldfield of the Sydney guild.
Of note was her frangipanis. This led to Eileen teaching other cake decorators — at the Riverstone Night School, the Sydney Cake Decorators Guild, and the Golden West Cake Decorators Guild at Plumpton — how to create these iconic, botanically correct blooms.
Royal Easter Show — late 1960s
Eileen's work was renowned, and her frangipani-decorated cake won first prize at the Royal Easter Show in the late 1960s.
Her earliest recorded wins came in 1967, while she was still a student of the Riverstone Evening College cake decorating classes. The Windsor and Richmond Gazette of Wednesday 31 May 1967 reported that Mrs E. Brace of Riverstone won two second-place positions at the Royal Easter Show, as well as first place in her beginners' section.
A dining room of wedding cakes
Eileen mastered the translucent petal work and the iconic Australian String Work, which featured heavily on the wedding cakes that forever adorned her dining room in varied stages of completion — along with her delicate and realistic flannel flowers and orchid sprays, all hand-painted with such precision, you couldn't tell it wasn't real until you tried to smell its aroma or touch it.
This was my grandmother. I grew up surrounded by cakes, icing, and floral bouquets made entirely of edible sugar.