My Project - April 2012

Hi all,

I can now reveal my little project!

I spent a few days, a few tears and a few tantrums making an Arsenal cake for the fellas little brother whose 21st was on the 4th April.

Firstly I started by making a sketch on paper and buying the colours of fondant (I needed two strong reds so bought as otherwise it would have taken an age to colour white fondant!!). I then made a plaque with just the overall shape of the shield using white fondant and tylo to give it a bit of suport when I started to add the other fondant.

To transfer over onto the fondant, I simply placed the paper over some rolled fondant and used the scribing tool from my sugarcraft tools to make an indent into the icing, then cut with a sharp knife.

The tears came when I made the cake! I'm sure everyone has had a few disasters in the kitchen before, but I made a 9 inch madeira cake that could have been used to anchor a boat as it was so unbelievably dense and heavy!! That went straight in the bin and I restarted using an 8 egg sponge mix and using a flower nail in the centre on the tin (which you put in before adding the mixture) to ensure the cake was cooked in the centre (the flower nail acts as a convector and heats up helping to cook the inside of the cake so no hard crusts and sloppy centres!). I would recommend adding a flower nail if doing a cake larger than 7 inches as it takes a while for the inside to cook otherwise. Obviously remove before icing!!!

I'm pretty impressed with this considering the plaque was done in two sittings - without throwing anything away and starting again!

Speak soon.x.

Plaques

Hello!

In week two of my course, we learnt how to make "plaques" for cakes.

Now, whats a plaque you may ask? Basically a plaque is a piece of hard icing with either a figure, animal, words or numbers on. They can be flat, or 3D.

Now, the plaque I made in class wasn't too great as I didn't have access to all of my tools, so these are the two I made at home. I used the Dr Oetker pre coloured modelling icing for this, but you can use normal fondant icing with a small amount of either tylo or gum tragacanth.

The basic receipe for using tylo powder is 1/2 tsp per 250g of fondant. This needs folding in and kneading into the fondant until it becomes quite stretchy.I would always recommend when it comes to colouring the fondant you use the gel colours (Asda do a small range and they are currently 2 for £3 (as of 02/03/12)). Add this using a cocktail stick as you really don't need a lot! I will do a little tutorial on colouring icing soon! Warning - your hands get pretty messy and stained!

These are my attempts at plaques. You'll see they are sitting on white icing bases, and this is the plaque base to put onto the top of the cake.

Not to shabby for a first try!! I may attempt a pig at the weekend, so I'll upload that too, with maybe a tutorial on how to do it.

I have prepared the photos for the fondant rose tutorial, I just need to upload them which should be done over the weekend, so come back and check!

Speak soon.

Kim.x.