Sexy Stiletto Gum Paste Workshop-- Austin, TX!

I was super excited to be able to teach my 2 day class in Austin.  I had a full house-- 15 students!!  The most I've ever had. :) Above are the 2 shoes I completed while teaching the class, which now live at All in One Bake Shop in Austin.

By the way, I've learned that demoing/ teaching and doing are completely different!  When I'm trying to assemble things so that people can see, or so that I'm in a mirror or in camera, I end up doing things at awkward angles... It's a different art from when I'm sitting in my living room completely focused on the task at hand, and one that I'm still working on mastering!

Anyway, here are the photos from class!

Keeping everybody busy!  

I was very impressed with my students in Austin.  At least one had an enviable shoe collection. :)  I saw some great cakes and some beautiful craftsmanship.  I learned from them too!

I owe so much thanks to the amazing Kyla Meyers for organizing this class.  If you know her, you know she's amazing at what she does and a super nice person.

I hope everyone had a blast and I'm looking forward to teaching again at the end of September at Mother of Cakes Sugar Art Academy in Allentown, PA!

Austin Day of Sharing

So once I was *finally* done shipping and packing everything for Austin in my ginormous new suitcase, I finally arrived in the great state of Texas.

If you know me, it's no big secret that I have a not-so-secret love of Texas.  I mean, what's not to like?  Meat? Good.  Cowboys? Goooooood... ;)  I also might like country music and two-stepping, but don't tell anyone.

I arrived a couple days early and spent time with my fabulous friend Tina, who I went to high school with.  She and I ate some awesome food, like this bacon maple doughnut from Gordough's:

Don't judge me.  It was one of the greatest things I've ever eaten.  We also ate some other unusual foods, like foie gras and duck egg and fried bone marrow and beef heart.  Fantastic!

I had the luxury of using her kitchen to finish prepping for the day of sharing where I enjoyed the company of her cat, Mr. Peanut.

He's so awesome he even has his own Facebook page.

Back to the sugar.  For my demo, I decided to show the zebra print portion of my latest shoe, and some cheetah print on a cake, and then whatever else I had time for.  So I pre-made my shoe up to this point:

This photo and the remaining photos in this post are by Chris Wingler.

This was my very first time doing a one hour demonstration and I had a big audience!  I also had some really talented decorators/ demo-ers on before me, so I was feeling the pressure.  I had a table on a stage and a camera that was projecting me onto big screens on the sides of the room.  For the record, it was really hot on stage.  So even though I was lamenting not investing in a chef's coat in time for this event, I was really glad not to be wearing long sleeves...

Not sure what I'm doing in this picture, but I seem to be concentrating on it. :)

Here's the completed shoe from the Day of Sharing.

And my little table display...

Here I am (far left) with the other demonstrators:  Janet Rosebeary, Ashlee Trotter, Kimberly Chapman, and Ruth Rickey.  What a fabulous bunch!  I learned something from all of them and they're all such fun people.

Overall, a great experience!  I learned a lot about new decorating techniques and picked up some good tips on giving demos as well.  I also want to thank the Capital Confectioners for inviting me, especially the president, Kyla Myers, who organized the whole event and coordinated my class the following days!

Up next:  Pics from my 2 day Sexy Stiletto Workshop!

Prepping for Austin!

Welcome to my kitchen after my gum paste making extravaganza.

I was totally stoked to be invited to Austin to participate in the Capital Confectioners annual Day of Sharing as one of the demonstrators (this means I needed to prepare a ~1 hour demo) and to stay and teach my 2 day Sexy Gum Paste Stiletto Workshop on the following days.

When I teach my class here at International Sugar Art Collection, all of the supplies and gum paste are taken care of.  Out in Austin, I was coordinating with the fabulous Kyla, who managed to procure many of the supplies, but I still had to bring/ ship a bunch of stuff out there.  Not the least of which was 28 lbs of pre-colored gum paste.  That's right, for a class of 15 students plus myself I needed 10 POUNDS of red gum paste, 6 lbs of navy, and 4 lbs each of white and ivory.  That's a lot of work for my poor kitchen aid. But I did this over the course of a few days.  Let me reiterate:

Yup, powdered sugar strikes again and again.  I made one color per day and put it in my new freezer.  Oh yeah, I'm now the proud owner of no less than 2 refrigerators + the one that is part of my apartment.

So I shipped out my huge box of gum paste and sole formers for the class about a week ahead of time.  Then I started making lists... and lists... and finally a pile:

I don't think you understand how big this pile is, so here's a picture with my foot in it for scaling:

I had to buy a bigger suitcase.  The box you see there is my carry-on with a prototype of each of the red and blue shoes for my class (which made it in one piece!  And made it home almost unscathed but Austin security really jostled it around and the red shoe came unglued and I had a heart attack...)  Everything else in this pile is class/ demo supplies.

So you can see why you hadn't heard from me for a while...

Tomorrow I'll recap the day of sharing!

Zebra Print Gum Paste High Heel

Okay, okay.  So first of all, I apologize for being a blogging slacker for the last month.  I have a partially valid excuse, I promise.

In case you haven't heard, this past week I traveled to Austin, TX to participate in the Capital Confectioners Day of Sharing as the headlining demonstrator(!) and to teach my 2 day gum paste stiletto class.  I know.  I was really stoked about it.  

However, this required a lot of preparation.  We'll address a lot of this in some subsequent posts, but one of my orders of business was to figure out what I was going to demo!  Since it was a jungle theme, I opted to center my demo around animal prints.  I decided that I would demo a zebra print on a shoe, because how cool would that be!

So I just had to come up with a new shoe design and figure out how to do zebra print.  No problem, right?

Well, you know me, I like to make everything difficult.  So first I developed a new heel idea.

Okay, so I 'cheated' and made it out of styrofoam.  Actually I made 2, one for the practice shoe and one to take on the road with me.  The heels were then wrapped in gum paste and painted to look like wood.  Now, if I wanted to make this fully edible, I would create a mold from a styrofoam form and then cast it in chocolate and proceed as normal.

Here's an up close shot of the painting process.  I couldn't paint the whole heel at my demo so I brought it pre-made.  However, I did demo the painting technique on a flat piece of gum paste so people could see how I did it.

I did some experimenting to perfect the zebra technique:

The second one is a little more fun. :)

Aren't the studs fun?  I made my own mold for those using a rhinestone I found in the scrapbooking section at Michael's and Amazing Mold Putty.  And I love the patent leather look of the red edging on the toe piece.  I achieved that look by painting it with confectioners glaze to give it a high shine.

The flower is gum paste with plastic stamen.  

I did the label with an oval cutter and then trimmed the edge with my favorite tool, the PME Design Wheeler using the zig zag attachment.  That's also how I do my stitching....

Ah, shoe love!  Now for the Austin posts!

Sometimes life calls for chocolate covered strawberries....

Chocolate cake, chocolate ganache with strawberries, chocolate swiss meringue buttercream, and chocolate covered strawberries.  

The piping was done with PME Supatube 44 and PME tip 1.5.  I discovered it was a little tricky to maintain the icing consistency of the piping icing and the icing on cake because the weather is getting so warm.  Swiss meringue buttercream is entirely butter-based, so it is prone to softening.  

Still, a chocolate lover's dream! :)

Calvin and Hobbes Cake

When my friend Andrea asked me to make a cake for her boyfriend's birthday, I jumped at the chance.  Andrea is one of my favorite people to serve cake to... why?  Because if it were socially acceptable, Andrea is someone who would cut a slice of the cake and then run off with the rest of it. :)

It all started with chocolate cake, chocolate ganache, and fresh strawberries.

Then, in case there wasn't already enough chocolate (is there even such a thing?)  I covered the whole cake in chocolate ganache.

After the first coating:

After a whole lot of smoothing:

Yes, you can also see my laptop, which I use to play music while I'm working, and my 2 varieties of vanilla extract, because one just isn't enough for me.

After the ganache set up, I covered the cake in fondant and carefully stenciled on the black stripes using softened fondant and a designer stencil.

Of course, this was my first time trying the stenciling technique myself (and I see people mess it up on TV all the time.)  So obviously I chose to use the most unforgiving color combination: black on white.  If something does get messed up, you can fix it using vodka.  Really, there are two options.  Either use a clean paintbrush with some vodka to clean up your mistake or drink the vodka until you can't see the mistake.  ;)

I added the image to the top of the cake using a combination of pin pricking through a picture I had printed out and just drawing it using an edible food color pen.  Once I had the design outlined, I started painting it with a combination of gel colors and petal dusts diluted with vodka.

I was pretty excited about this cake and about sharing it with friends.  Of course it was a big success.

Happy Birthday, Abe!

Baby Shower Cake

How I've missed you all!  (And I'm sure you've missed me too...)

I apologize for the recent lack of posts; finishing my semester proved to be hectic and after the Florida I.C.E.D. cake I needed a little time to let my apartment be clean.

I am doing 2 cakes this weekend, and here is the first one.  It was for a baby shower:

For this cake, I started using Massa fondant instead of my usual Satin Ice, and it was pretty nice to work with.  The bow is gum paste, and I was pretty excited about how the striping came out.

Since I had some creative license with this cake, I opted to not do the classic 'baby bump' cake and rather chose to do the figure on the cake.  While I might have created more work for myself, I really have a problem with the idea of people cutting into stomach and eating it.  Maybe it's just me.

I made most of the figure out of modeling chocolate and added the details using gum paste.

Thanks for looking and there's more cake headed your way very soon!  Now if I could just stop sampling the chocolate ganache...


Also, I will be teaching this summer-- I will teach my 2 day Gum Paste Stiletto class in Norcross, GA June 4-5 (http://www.nicholaslodge.com/classes.aspx?nd=423&id=167)  and in Austin, TX July 11-12  (http://dos.capitalconfectioners.com/index.php).