More Fun with Fondant

Yesterday we attended the relaunch of a live radio broadcast of our Burning Man Camp, Camp Want It! It will be a weekly event on Sunday afternoons, and then the set will be played on a continuous loop throughout the week. You can check it out here.

http://www.live365.com/stations/campwantit

I wanted to make some commemorative cupcakes for the day, so I got out my gum paste and metal cookie cutters and had so much fun cutting out the letters and sticking them on the cupcakes. I made chocolate cupcakes with a simple buttercream frosting that I colored red with gel food coloring. This time, instead of piping the frosting, I just spread it on, which created a nice, flat surface and great background for the letters. I also liked the way the letters looked on a full sized cupcake rather than a mini.

This opens up so many decorating possibilities, especially if I figure out how to color the gum paste - all sorts of cute cut-outs could be placed on colored backgrounds. Let the fun begin!

Fondant Follies

Our friends at Walzwerk, a wonderful East German restaurant, recently celebrated their 10 year anniversary, and I was asked to make 100 cupcakes to commemorate the occasion. An exciting challenge!

I wanted to make something very special with the "W" logo, which as you can see from the awning is a very industrial, straight-sided logo that also looks like smokestacks. I went to the store and bought a tub of fondant (also known as gum paste), and had fun playing with it. It's so easy - you just roll it out like cookie dough, cut it, and stick it on. It has the consistency of play dough, so it's easy to use but will dry out if you leave it out too long.

I bought a set of mini cookie cutters in the alphabet, so that all of the letters would look uniform. The "W" didn't look right though, but I found that when I used the "M" upside down, it had more of that straight-sided look.

To emulate the look of the smoke stacks, I used a toothpick dipped in vanilla bean paste and made pinpricks and lines at the top of each one (hopefully this helped them not look so much like upside down M's as well). It was a lot of work, but I enjoyed figuring out the process. The cupcakes were dark chocolate, with chocolate fudge frosting - next time I might not use the star tip, but something that would give them a little bit less height - that frosting is so thick it will not lay down for anything. Nevertheless, I was pleased with them.

It's great to be able to participate in your friends' milestone events, and contribute to the celebration in a personal way.