Fondant Star Gazer Tutorial

These stargazers are so beautiful and I really enjoy making them. Note, if you plan to use them on a cake, start making them AT LEAST a week ahead of time. You will need time for them to dry completely and harden. Then you need time to dust them (or paint if that's you're thing) and assemble, which also takes some time.

 You'll want to mix your fondant with gum paste so it's about a 50/50 mix. It hardens a bit (which your fondant alone wouldn't) and it doesn't dry so quickly that you have to rush to work with it (which would be gum paste alone). Stargazers come in so many different colors so feel free to be creative!

*Doing this project is a lot like doing math. It's long, it's involved, it's even tedious, but it's not hard*

In addition to your fondant/gum paste mix, you'll need a dusting pouch filled with a 50/50 mix of cornstarch and powdered sugar. You will need some gum glue, made by breaking up a pea size of gum paste into about a tablespoon of water and letting it dissolve. You will need a rolling pin and yes, I really do suggest Wilton's plastic rolling pins for ease of use. There's no problem not using one, just make sure it stays covered with your "dust". You will need wave former cups (or, heck, find anything round you can shape them over), the wide and narrow lily petal cutters, a petal impression mat, a round ball tool and veining tool, thin foam, floral wire and florist tape (6 pieces of white 26-gauge wire for the petals and one piece of green 20-gauge wire for the stem - you'll need 3 more pieces of green 26-gauge wire for leaves), Color Dust in deep pink, lime green and dark green as well as brushes with which to apply them.

Dust the BACK of your impression mat with your dusting pouch.

Roll out a small ball of gum paste / fondant.

 Shape that ball into a log and position it over the slit in the back. Make sure about 1/2" of the log is not on the crack.



Use your rolling pin to roll out the fondant. It should be less than 1/16 of an inch thick which means thinner than your pink rings if you're using the Wilton small fondant roller or just really thin if you're not using a rolling pin with guide rings.

Peel this off of the mat and use your narrow lily cutter to cut the shape of the petal. Position it so the tip of the petal does not have that extra stem piece.

Dip your white 26 gauge wire into gum glue and place it next to this flap. Fold the fondant over the wire to secure them together. This is the back-side of the petal.

Dust the front side of your impression mat. Place the petal front-side down onto the leaf impressions. Use your thin foam to press (with this mat from the student kit it will take quite a bit of pressure. They do make better mats that don't come in the student kit.) the petal into the impression mat. You should be able to see the impressions, but they will really stand out once we use the color dust after they have dried.

Transfer your petal onto the thin foam. Dust your ball tool and use this to ruffle the edges. There are many techniques for ruffeling. You can put most of the ball tool on the foam and a little on the petal and slide it (not roll it) around the petal with some pressure. You could scratch back and forth as if you were coloring. You could also put most of the ball tool inside the petal's edge and and roll it around. Practice, practice practice and you will find the way that works for you.



After you have it nice and ruffled, put it over the wave former cup to dry completely. This will take at least a full day. When you put your petals on there, put them at different angles. Remember the petals on flowers aren't all the same!

For each lily, you will need 3 narrow petals and 3 wide petals. I don't have pictures of making the leaves, but the process is exactly the same. You use green fondant and need 3 narrow lily cuts for each flower.



After everything is very, very and completely dry, you get to start decorating and putting them together!

Put a line of of deep pink Color Dust down the center of the petal.

You don't need much. Spread it out. Go out and look at some Stargazers: some have a lot of color and some have a little color. Tiger Lillies are really bright. Be creative!



Put some lime gream down near the stem of the petal.

Color all of your petals. I wanted to try the painting technique as well, so I mixed a little bit of color dust with a little bit of vodka. Using alcohol is better because - of how tacky it gets? I don't remember the exact reason, but the alcohol dries off so don't worry about that part. Plus, who is really going to eat these anyway?

Prepare your stamens. They come taped in groups but you'll want to remove the white tape and then use florist tape to attach them to a piece of 20 gauge green wire.



Wrap all the way down, pulling tightly to release the stickiness of the florist tape.

Then use the same process of wrapping over and over to attach each petal, one at a time.

Start with the three wide leaves.

Then add the the narrow leaves between them.

Each time, you are wrapping all the way down the stem. A thick stem will be helpful when you go to put the flower into the stem holders to put them in the cake.

Finally, brush the three green leaves with a mixture of lime and dark green. Add the three green leaves, one at a time, to the stem about halfway down.

There you have a finished stargazer lily! You can see some stargazers in action in this cake from the final class in Wilton Course 4: Advanced Fondant and Gum Paste


I linked up!

Wiltons Courses 2 and 3

Here are my final cake projects from Wilton's courses 2 and 3. They are both lemon pound cake. The first is covered with basket weave in buttercream icing with fondant flowers on the top. The second is covered and decorated with fondant. We also learned to do a lot of royal icing flowers, so pictures of those are at the bottom. Hello new job! No, literally - I might start teaching these classes starting in August. How exciting!?!?!

Roses, rosebuds, primroses, daffodils, violets, and little white flowers. Royal icing is like sugar candy that sits up nice and hard. You know those "Happy Birthday" letters you can buy at the store and put on your cake? Those are made with royal icing. Mine are prettier though :)








I so enjoy baking and decorating! If you live in the Southwest Virginia area and need a cake for an event shoot me a line!

I linked this post to a party at

 

2 Relatively Successful Cake Experiments

So last week I completed two cake experiments: and ice cream cake and a fondant covered cake. Here's how they went:

The ice cream cake was first. I was asked if I was able to make one and said I never had but could attempt it. Well, the woman changed her mind (it would have been too hard to transfer nicely from an hour away anyway) but it really got me thinking. I wanted to make an ice cream cake and started looking around. I didn't want to just stack ice cream with fudge. I wanted true cake + ice cream. I also wanted some aspect of it to be homemade. I had a cherry chip cake mix in the cabinet, so I started there. I made the cake according to the box and baked it. I read online how people went about freezing their cakes. One woman said she flips hers AS SOON as it comes out of the oven and puts it directly in the freezer. Well, I know this isn't a great idea but if I didn't try flipping immediately I would have constantly wondered if that would have been better. Turns out, it wasn't.

Clearly, it fell apart. But! that didn't deter me. It was just an experiment so I didn't really care much about how it looked. I froze it from here and continued to work with it.

While that was freezing, I made the ice cream. I knew I didn't want it to be just ice cream because it would be too hard after freezing. So I combined vanilla ice cream with Cool Whip (next time I might try making my own whipped cream?) and then blended together frozen blueberries and cherries. I put that back into the freezer to harden while I "cut" the cake in half (it more or less fell appart among fault lines you can sort of see there). Then I layered cake, ice cream, and more cake. I froze that back up and then covered it with some remaining whipped cream. It might not have looked very pretty, but it tasted delicious.

Next I started making a bachelorette cake for a friend. I decided I wanted to attempt to cover a cake in fondant, to make a two-tiered cake, and to try a lace pattern. The cake was supposed to be sort of classy but still fun.

The top tier I made out of two 6-inch cakes. I wanted them to be sort of thick so I filled them quite a bit - but that also meant I had to cut off quite a bit of the rounded top. It was hard to get it perfectly level, but really I could have gotten my small leveler out of the work closet. Oh well. I then made some of the fondant blue and cut strips. It was hard to keep them even because I don't have any fondant cutting tools and so it kept pulling. I knew I wanted a man popping out of the top, but darn it if Ken dolls are hard to find and more expensive than Barbie. Plus, they're too big to put into the top. I found this wrestler instead - luckily they're already topless! I made his bow tie and the garter for his hand, ripped off his legs and then stuck him in there!

The bottom tier I made using 3 8-inch cakes, each made real thin to avoid too much rounding. I guess I forgot to mention above that I mixed blue food coloring in one 6 inch tin and green in the other to make a tie-dye-ish cake. Here I layered blue, green, blue. All layers had butter cream in the middle. After layering the cakes, I covered them with buttercream and froze them again. Then I pulled out each tier and let them warm up just enough to make the icing tacky. While waiting for it to warm, I flavored my fondant using coconut rum (an ingrediant I also put into the cake in place of half the water). I then rolled out the fondant to about a quarter inch thickness and tried to make it circular, about the diameter equal to the diamter of the cake and twice the height (so here about 14 inches). Still needs work but I was happy with how well I did for the first time. I used my rolling pin to lift the fondant onto the cake. I smoothed it out using my hands - I have no fondant smoother. It didn't get as smooth as I would have liked though. I think I had too much buttercream on the outside of the cake. I didn't have any air bubbles but the fondant was still lumpy because of the excess of icing.

I tried a few different lace patterns on cake board before deciding on this one. I used the buttercream to draw the scrolls on the side of the cake. Again, not great but I was still happy with how it turned out. I put edible pearls in all of the places where multiple scrolls touched. Then on the top I wrote "One more fling before the ring" although it came otu a little messy because my icing was really warm. I had placed the top tier to figure out where to write, but then took it off for transport (about 8 hours).

When we got to the hotel where we were staying, I put it all together. Everybody loved it, bride included. I got a bunch of comments like "I've always heard fondant tastes gross but this is delicious!" and "At work we always pull off the fondant before serving wedding cakes because it's too much - but you have the perfect amount." I guess this was a job well done!