Left: a basket of roses made of butter, by Frederick Nicholson, general manager of the Sussex Dairy Company, Brighton. “At one exhibition at which this basket was shown, several ladies and others stooped down to smell the flowers, quite thinking they were looking at a basket of real, yellow roses.”

Right: A dahlia and roses made of lard. “The dahlia … has sixty-two petals, each one of which has to be fashioned separately and then frozen, before the flower can be built up. It seems it is far more difficult to make flowers out of lard than out of butter, on account of the former substance being much softer and more oily. Mr. Nicholson says it takes him three minutes to make a rose-bud; four minutes to make a tuberose; five minutes to make an arum lily; six minutes to make a full-blown rose, and no less than three-quarters of an hour to make a dahlia.”

(From Strand, February 1898)