hi I'm Rachel from Rachel's guest tutor at pretty witty cakes so you might just have noticed that we're not filming in our normal studio and that's because we've taken pretty witty cakes on the road then in today's little freebie tutorial I'm going to show you how to make a pretty stand-up number okay so if you're doing a gift cake or a birthday cake a really nice thing to do is to pop the number on the top so say it's a little boy's second birthday or a little girl's second birthday rather than handwrite happy second birthday around the base which actually I'm a bit anti I hate writing happy second birthday blah blah blah around the base of the cake just because I feel that the cake is a statement of the birthday and if that person happened to be - then why not put lovely number two on the top of the cake so there's different ways of doing your stand-up numbers and you can get all sorts of different lovely number cutters on the market so I have a set here it's little them around for you so lovely one two three four and I go all the way up to zero with that so we can get all the numbers and these are really good these are really good they're made from plastic and they cut out a really nice big size number so using a cutter is the easiest way to make your stand up number and you can see here that I've already pre-cut a number two now I've used floral paste to do this the pace that dries really really nice and firm and hard and I've cut this out and it's really nice and dry now it's not going to flop over it's going to stand up and when I roll my floral paste to make that shape for my stand up number you're going to want to roll it out quite thickly not too thick but much thicker than you would roll it if you were making a little flower for example if I just I'm not going to cut another one out I'm just going to show you there's a nice thickness there of about three millimeters I would say and you can see that if you look on the edge of my number two that I've gone nice and thick and that's because we don't want it to break really easily and it also needs to have a certain amount of rigidity so it's going to stand up on our cake okay so cut out your number whatever your preferred number is when you've cut out your number something's going to need to help us stand this turnaround the right way number two on top of the cake so by purely putting a little bit of royal icing on the bottom isn't going to be that secure so I tend to get myself a cocktail stick and I like to attach that cocktail stick to the back of the number okay and the way I do that so I get another little piece of floral paste and I roll it out thinner this time to about a millimeter in thickness okay and we're going to use it like a little bandage so I'll just put a bit of cornflour down okay and on my number two so I flipped it over so we're on the underside now it's going to be different depending on what number you use so for a number one for example you've got a nice straight area where you can stick your cocktail stick number two we've got a bit less of an area but I want to try and conceal my cocktail stick so I don't want to put it there because when we see our number two from the front we'll be able to see all of the wood there are some numbers where you can't help see a little bit of wood but if you can try to conceal that cocktail stick okay when you've done loops when you've chosen where you're going to put it get a knife and just cut a little bandage when I say bandage I mean like a little strip that's cut the end off and what I want to do is just test that bandage and make sure that when it's gone over the stick I can't see any overhang so you can see there there's a little bit of overhang so I might just trim that off like that so it fits over my stick and then using some edible glue I'm just going to paint the back I'm also going to paint the stick all the way around and then I'm going to pop my stick back on and then my little bandage so hold it nice and flat against the number my little bandage is going to go up and cover the cocktail stick and then using your fingers just try to squish down either side of the stick even your nails if you've got them if you don't have good nails you could maybe just use the edge of a knife so just make sure that you've pressed it down really nice and securely both sides of that cocktail stick okay and then you're going to need to leave that probably overnight or for a good few hours until it's really really dry and secure and when it is nice and dry and secure you'll be able to pick it up and that will push straight into the top of your cake and that's going to hold it really nice and secure depending on your number like a number one doesn't have much surface area that's going to touch the cake you might want to just add a little line very very fine line of royal icing all the way along the base there so that when you push it into the cake that little extra tub of royal icing is going to help secure that on okay so there's our number two it's looking a bit blank and plain at the moment so if you want to make it look a little prettier you can pimp it up a bit so I have some spare little flowers here that I made some little sugar flowers and some icing in a piping bag and then just take some flowers they could be bigger they could be smaller you could even pipe some little dots onto your number just pretty up a little bit so I'm going to attach those a couple of different places you don't have to put them all over or you could just put a couple at the top and a couple at the bottom and whatever you decide to decorate your number with make sure it's going to tie in with the cake that you've designed once it's starting to look cute I'm going to put two at the top okay and if I twiddle that round you can see there that we've got a lovely pretty number two now if you don't want to invest in lots of cutters and I have to say my whole set of cutters was quite expensive you can use other ways of making your numbers you can roll your own okay so here's a number six that I did whoops haven't actually stuck that on here's a number six that I did by rolling out some paste I'm going to show you how I did that I've mixed up some blue floral paste here so again you could do any any of the numbers like this get your pace nice and pliable and then try to roll it into a sausage okay let's move that one out the way a little bit he's still drying start to roll it into a sausage with your hands and then it's gonna depend on how big a number you want as to how thin or thick you roll it but we'll go for something like the number six there we go once you've got it to a certain stage grab your smoothers and then use them to start to create a more even roll you will find if you roll with your hands and your fingers sometimes you end up with a bit of a lumpy bit where one of your fingers is squashed down a little bit firmer than the other okay and this is going to give you a really nice even sausage when you've got your even sausage trim off one of the ends okay and then what number should we do maybe we could do number two okay so have a little look at how much paste you think you're gonna need okay and then you're really just forming it with your fingers so I'm gonna put a little curl little curl at the top of my number two like that and then I want it to come round if you're not very good at deciding how your number is going to sit you could always draw he goes let me show you on a piece of paper and use that as your template okay so you can either make it up where you can sit this over the top and then form your number like that so we're going to come down and then I'm just going to pinch it a little just to create that bend in my number two and then when I get to the end of my number two I'm going to just roll it again and that's just going to give it a nice pretty start and finish okay and then on those little rolls I'm going to put the tiniest dab of edible glue and that's going to stop them unrolling and secure them a little bit better so a little table on that one and a little table on that one and then if you just squeeze them together again they should stay nicely in position so make sure it's looking exactly how you want it to look there you go and that's twiddle that round so there we've got a nice number two and I've done that in exactly the same manner as I did this looking number six okay and I've just pushed my cocktail stick straight into that soft floral paste and created our number six so in the same manner if you wanted to pretty it up a little bit more you could grab a little grab a little flower and attach that to your number or when it's nice and dry you could even let's just come unstuck a little bit squishing down you could even take your piping bag and add some little pin dots all the way around do remember you're going to need to let all of this piping dry completely before you go to put it on the cake and there you go there is our number two okay so if I twiddle that round alongside that one and there's our little cutout number two there's some really easy ways of making a pretty stand-up number you