Spray Painting Fondant

OK, by "spray painting" I don't mean tagging; I mean adjusting the color of fondant with a coat of Color Mist Food Color Spray. You may recall, I'm in the midst of a quest to create red fondant from scratch, and this is the latest step in that endeavor. I slapped some of the brick red fondant I wound up with on a cake, and decided to give the Food Color Spray a try. As with any spray painting project, there will be overspray, so I came up with a way to mask the silver cake board. Get a large sheet of paper (for this 6" cake an 11x17" sheet of paper was appropriate), a pen, scissors, and the pan the cake was baked in.

 Start by tracing the base of the pan in the center of the paper…

 …and cut it out just on the outside of the outline (you'll need to allow extra space beyond the edge of the pan for the undercoating and fondant).

When you have the size right, slide the paper on over the cake, down to the board.

 Do some test sprays on a paper towel. You want to hold the can at a 45 degree angle to the cake and about 12" away from the surface. Use sweeping, overlapping strokes; don't ever hold the can still while you're spraying.

 When you're done spraying the cake, cut the paper away and remove it. Don't try to lift it back up over the cake.

In a fit of urban whimsy, I felt the need to tag this cake. I went online and found this free graffiti font, Street Soul. 

I printed out a 6x6" image of it and laid it over the cake. I traced over it with a ballpoint pen, just hard enough to leave a faint imprint in the fondant.

 I removed the printout and did a second pass with the knife tool from the Wilton Deluxe Gum Paste Tool Set:

 I loaded a piping bag with thinned royal icing and the oval Ateco tip #57 (one of my faves for text) and knocked out a tag. I guess it's true; if you run into me in a dark alley, you'll probably get iced (but not like that).

Piping Bows with an Oval Tip

It's been a while since I picked up a piping bag; darn Wilton's new gum paste class! I was going to post another gum paste flower today, but decided to fool around with royal icing. I've been wanting to make some cute little bows to use in a cake border or on cupcakes, so here's what I came up with. I cut some parchment paper, then taped it to a cookie sheet:

I loaded a piping bag with royal icing. It took a while to find the right tip for what I had in mind; I fumbled around with various rose, ribbon, and star tips before settling on tip #57 by Ateco, which is an oval. I've mostly used it for writing cursive on cakes (a larger area sticks to the cake with an oval tip than with a round one). I started by piping a bunch of infinity signs, holding the tip at about a 45 degree angle to the surface.

Then I piped a couple of wavy tails:

It would be fine to stop there, but I wanted to try piping some sort of knot in the middle. Start at the base of the infinity symbol where the tails meet it, and pipe a short length up to the top:

Some of them had this unsightly peak…

…which can easily be tapped out with a finger, once you've touched it to a dusting pouch filled with a 50/50 mixture of powdered sugar and cornstarch:

I wanted to try another chunkier bow; something that might be appropriate for Hello Kitty (I recently found a Hello Kitty cookie cutter; an import, not licensed). I made a bunch of infinity signs that had rounder loops; a little more like an 8.

I piped the vertical line…

…and tapped it down into place. The bows can easily be removed from the parchment paper when they are dry after a few hours; peel the paper away from them like a sticker, and have a small spatula handy to pry them free if they're really stuck. Now that I know this idea for piping bows works, I'd better go snap up one of those cookie cutters before they get recalled!