K8memphis

The wafer paper ones also stand up though. Or do you mean you are using them laying down?

Which is exactly why your idea to make a special meal for her is so wonderful! My kids have done this for us and for me. I mean who bakes for the baker*? I would definitely do the fried okra. You can buy it frozen if that doesn't offend anyone's sensibilities. Or you could do it 'from scratch' more or less and bread some zucchini and/or mushrooms for the other folks. Onion rings? I think I would just make a real elaborate salad that can substitute as a meal for anyone who needs to fill up. Even two different salads would cover a multitude of palates. *Umm, little story about kidlette making my birthday cake one year. Chocolate on chocolate to die for. She was mildly upset that some of the chocolate in the frosting did not melt & made specks. The next day we got an ad in the mail for a new Cookbook with a ginormous glossy picture of chocolate cake with chocolate speckled icing. Too cool. Steve, does your Mom like speckled? SB might wanna think about asking his Sweet Mom maybe and taking some notes?

I would make them out of rolled fondant with cornstarch added, or gum paste or umm, candy clay or a combination of two or three of those. I don't know if pastillage butterflies will 'metamorphis' on buttercream or not. Do you want this for a display??? The rice paper or wafer paper ones can be kinda delicate. I'd be more worried about those for a display. And I think I've seen them made out of gelatine too. Oh yeah, don't forget royal icing--that might dissolve on buttercream though. Unless you wired it.

Let's not let the cat out of the bag lest someone in California hear about this and pass some other anti-dragee law. You know dragees are illegal there. However, and with a cake loaded with spoofle dust headed out the door just this afternoon, let me be the first to say, I don't want to eat much of it myself. Even when I wash some of the paint containers (when you mix it with alcohol in a little dish to paint with it) even in the dishwasher the paint doesn't wash off. I don't want to know what it does to your guts, y'know? Umm, that is one thing ole maligned Wilton has in it's favor it doesn't make stuff that's not fda. Their spoofle dusts suck too, but you can't have everything I guess. Florist foil, long a staple in cake deco, is not food safe. But Wilton carries food safe foil. Those lovely artistical powders, sadly not food safe. Crayons are non-toxic but you should not eat them. Same same. So maybe that's why God created fondant, so we can spoofle dust it for beauty and then discard it.

!!!LET THE HEALING BEGIN!!! sitting cross legged with eyes closed in serenity, face tilted heavenward, one hand in the bowl of kisses (Hershey's) the other hand feverishly unwrapping... [hmmmmmmmmm]

Oh hell, in a few years they're gonna come out and say chocolate is the mother of all disease and corruption. I'll take it while I can. Guilt free chocolate gorging, come one come all!! Eat more chocolate!

To me, the joy of using a zester is that you can hold the fruit and scrape it with the zester so you don't have to keep turning the fruit over and looking to see if you're hitting the pith or whatever. Y'know like holding the zester handle like a violin bow. Too awkward to turn the fruit over repeatedly. If there's no handle then that's no fun.

Lisa, for sure. My Wilton ball tool has a jagged seam down the middle. Hahaha yeah not funny. But most of them are not like that. And you are exactly correct. I agree with everything you said. I just got some of the Nic Lodge dvd's and I really like his teaching style.

What about making a thinnish pretty chocolate piece with the transfer on it and place it on top of the warm ganache. Geez, just writing "warm ganache" early in the morning feels so right. But you could even get a bigger bang with a color change too between the two chocolates. You could use a blossom type cutter and a diamond like Tweety's and hearts all different shapes and place them on top maybe..

I make a real moist fudgie but browniefull browniemous magical brownie from Jeri Dry and Alix Engle's sweet little cookie book, Cookiemania. Love this little book. I lost it once and my daughter who got me the original, replaced it. It's out of print but just a rock solid every cookie 100% perfect book. Then of course I found the original. I should give her one, but I thoroughly enjoy the luxury of two. Well anyway back to brownies. So I take some dried cherries, like three inches in a narrow coffee cup and pour in like an inch and a half of rum. Cover securely with plastic wrap. Microzap this watching closely so that it just bubbles up nicely for a coupla minutes so most all the alcohol evaporates. So then when it's removed from the microwave, the plastic will suck down in the cup and all the rest of the liquid will get sucked into the cherries. It's kinda fun to do. Sometimes the plastic pops open from the strain. But then I chop the cherries and add them to the mixture with a tad of almond extract. So you have killer chocolate covered cherry brownies For a nice topper for brownies, right out of the oven, I slice them, and drizzle a confectioner sugar glaze. Because they are sliced, the drizzle can sink down in the nooks and crannies and that gives a light crispiness too. And a nice complement to the intense chocolateness. If you really wanna go all out, add a dash of vanilla to the glaze. These brownies come out with an amazing texture. They melt in your mouth. Some brownie musings for y'all.

There are no structural problems in wiring cherry blossoms or fashioning floral sprays. It's very simple. Silicone (molds) veiners are not used to speed up the process. They are used to produce realistic blooms and leaves. In the interest of time silicone molds can be purchased as they are abundant and readily available in gum paste floral work. No need to make veiners. Yeah, Wilton is pretty much cheap crap and their instructional materials don't even attempt any degree of realism that I've seen; you'll basically be making little blobs that vaguely suggest flowers if you use your imagination. As far as coloring goes, there are no steadfast rules, but you generally want to work the same way you would with watercolors. Start out with your lightest color mixed into the base and brush the darker colors on top of that. ← Not even close. I don't agree that one should start out with the cheapest materials one can find in any discipline. If you want to learn to play a musical instrument, you will experience nothing but constant frustration if you go pick up some junky knock-off at Sears that doesn't play properly. Same applies to painting, sculpting and cooking--cut the wrong corner and you're actually costing yourself more money in the long run. ← So we talking a platinum exacto? For certain orchids and lilies with complicated reproductive organs that absolutely must be molded, probably not. For most of the common flowers tackled by beginners, fancy equipment is an unnecessary crutch that will ultimately become a hinderance. I'd go so far as to say that if you cannot make do with a knife, your fingers and some ingenuity, then you're not learning so much as you are regurgitating a memorized formula. The latter approach will almost always yield symbolic representations with a paint-by-numbers/cartoony sort of aesthetic rather than realistic representations that make peoples' jaws drop, but each has its place in the world. ← And your web address is...? Generally message boards hold a variety of opinions. Usually there's room for everyone's. Imposing a higher than air standard on a simple discussion of someone wanting to learn about gumpaste cherry blossoms puts the loft in lofty. There are two position stated here. In one, the exacto knife is king. In the next only the pricey stuff will do. Wrong and wrong. Chocogrok wants to do some gum paste, the Wilton kit makes an excellent starter kit. It's the decorator's fingers that make the music, not the money spent or not on the equipment. But a beginner needs more than an exacto knife. There are two camps for gum paste flower making. Sylvia Weinstock can make her stuff without cutters. I tried that and I need the cutters and veiners and tools. If you go the Sylvia route you need a Sylvia to teach you. Otherwise consider the Wilton kit at Hobby Lobby or Michael's. They do half price coupons too.

I don't agree that one should start out with the cheapest materials one can find in any discipline. If you want to learn to play a musical instrument, you will experience nothing but constant frustration if you go pick up some junky knock-off at Sears that doesn't play properly. Same applies to painting, sculpting and cooking--cut the wrong corner and you're actually costing yourself more money in the long run. I also cannot say that any of your work looks particularly realistic. It's decorative to be sure, and I'm sure many clients would be thrilled with them as they are, but can you honestly say that anyone would be fooled into thinking that those were real flowers? ← It is the OP's request for 'Gumpaste 101' and mild horror (that I share) of the cost of classes that prompted Pastrymama to suggest a viable solution of Wilton. Pastrymama's work is very nice and she has no need to defend her work just because she made a very useful suggestion to somone wanting to learn gum paste. The critique is out of place in this discussion.

Far beyond way way cool. Be still my heart.

There's no way in the world you can get by with just an exacto knife and very little else. Wilton is a great place to start because this equipment is not cheap. You can easily spend $100 bucks on cutters and veiners for one flower. Not to mention brushes and formers and gum paste oh my. And the tools necessary and there's lots of stuff you need. Wilton is a great place to start. Because it is not wise to invest hundreds of dollars to determine if you even like or want to continue doing this. Wilton cutters are nice because they have nice rounded tops that are easy on the fingers and they cut really nice. The cutting edge is beveled which is also nice. Lots of Wilton is good, folks. And the opposite is true as well. But the WILTON gum paste kit in particular is nice because you get the whole package and some simple instruction to see if you like it. Umm, classes or demos are very very nice. I think the Scott Clark Wooley book is a good reference guide however it is not a good start up book. Nic Lodge is a great teacher and he has inexpensive dvd's and stuff. nicholaslodge.com

White sugar + molasses = brown sugar

I had my doubts when I read the subject, but you really do have a point. Does anyone remember Silvercup Bread in Chicagoland? I don't know if it existed in other cities. It was soft squishy bread with an amazing delightful chewy lush crust but it was all soft too. Cadilac bread. Crazy good.

I'm not suggesting that anyone here does this, however just to balance out the contract discussion, I think if I was the bride I might tend to balk at some of the contracts some people use. In fact I think I would run screaming. The kind where you have clause after clause like you're buying a freaking house and have to initial here and initial there and if there's a car wreck and if I break my arm and if this and if that. You can trace some people's entire history by all the rampant appendages and addenda exasperateeum (that needs to go in the I just made up that word thread) in their contract. The idea of covering allergies, to me, fits in this category of far too much information. Not necessary. It's absolutely the personal responsibility of the individual with the sensitivity. There's no way a caker can guarantee their cake for people who might otherwise need an epi pen. So my practice is if asked I state verbally that I make no health claims. I just have an order blank. I get all the info. I write down the money part, the amounts, the dates due and the non-refundable-ness of it all. They sign and away we go.

I really think you need to try cooking them forever before you try the pounding thing. Cooking forever works for sure. Pounding & stuff is a definite maybe. In fact pound them before you cook them forever and you will enjoy your meal. (My) Mom knows, Dude.

I like to preserve the chocolate-ness of a great chocolate cake by filling with cream cheese filling and icing with a vanilla swiss meringue. Raspberry or berry filling would be great. Umm, banana filling would be cool. A shake of cinnamon sugar would be heavenly.

I'm so sorry about the chicken! Eeghads the smoke detector for ten minutes, shit! But in another sense and after you come back from vacation, you will live to laugh uproariously about this. Not now of course. [ Much later ] But man that salad sounds fabulous. And all the extra effort in the zucchini is very kind and generous of you. On the dessert--"Can I have some more, sir?" (from Oliver of course) Looks really good! And the chicken looks great.

I have a warming drawer in the bottom of my GE Profile XL44. I love it. I use it often. Well I use it all the time I guess, because when it's not warming something it's great storage. But when we've had company it's invaluable. Like we did beaucoups of for real french fries in there once. Lots of stuff. Plus I use it all the time for drying out cake decorating stuff. Like I just made calla lily stems. Or if I make gum paste stuff. I love mine and I don't think the whole stove was $900. For bread rising, I use a pan of steamy water inside the turned off oven. When I had a pilot light in there it was easier. But nothing beats radiators for true drawer (and the contents of the drawers) warming.

Here's the link for the story. But it seems what happened is that alledgedly Thomas Jefferson's initials were inscribed in these bottles of wine and this guy spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on them and he's now suing and the wine deal is being investigated by the FBI now. Five bottles at $100,000 a piece. Think I'll stick to Diet Coke.

How big will it be? You can do chocolate cake but no chocolate icing if it's for outside. Cakes outside can melt or fade. Even in Chicago where it'd be probably cool in May. The addition of the outdoor factor ups the ante considerably. The wind, the bugs, the sun. Wedding cakes generally are the focal point at the wedding. Putting it outside dilutes it's effect considerably and it becomes a sensitive liability registering high on the stressometer. Be sure to have a real good backup plan because you have to wait til the last minute to know if the weather will cooperate. The demo that Alana so kindly referenced is at this link. Good luck. Are you still in school at this time? Would a teacher want to take this on as a class project? That would be cool. I mean if they wanted a cake that was on a stand like these where you just bake a cake and sit it on it's own individual plate. No construction issues no problem-o. Just so many variables. What else do you know about the order? How many servings? Afternoon or evening? How far away is delivery? What kind of decor? What kind of assembly like stacked or columns or what? Lots of brides will say "I just want a simple cake" Yeah, that doesn't mean simply made or decorated. It is not easy to get a smooth finish on a cake. It takes some skill. Fresh flowers? Oh yes, call around to three or four bakeries and price a 100 serving tier cake and ask them what size it is. Size and price will probably vary considerably. Do not undercharge any bakery. That's just not nice. Huge learning curve but you can so do it. My first cake was for a student at the school where I worked as a bread and dessert baker. Never made a tier cake before. So I got a Wilton book...

Oh cool! I'm making this for lunch for my husband. He loves this stuff.

I ditto Costo's or Sam's Club, but I haven't seen it under nine bucks in a while. It was twice that a few years ago from bad weather in Madagascar or something. Maybe the price has dropped some more since my last purchase. If there's a choice of two brands, check the ingredients label of course.