I have said it before: I am not an arts and crafts girl. I think its because I am not a perfectionist, and easily get bored with what I am doing. As a result, when Mary asked me to do the food for her shoot, I said, “Sure,” and called Becca up. This was going to require her expertise.
We started with food gels, which I now will swear by. If you need to dye something and you really want it to become a rich, deep color, then you need food gel coloring.
We also needed fondant for this project. I had never worked with it, but since have worked with it several times, and I am still of the opinion that I’d rather have a cake look less “perfect” and be covered in frosting, any day. It’s not that fondant tastes bad, it just doesn’t taste good and as something that’s mostly sugar, I feel like it should. Plus, after you use your hands to color, mold, and build something out of fondant, you’re less likely to actually want to eat that thing you just made of fondant.
Back to food gel coloring. It is the consistency of jelly, and it will definitely produce the actual color you want.
We started with the lightest color we needed – yellow, and worked to dark. We needed the primary colors, plus black.
Becca was generous to do the primary colors. I agreed to do black.
My hands may look purple, but it ended up being black. Becca and I had colored hands for a week. But unless you have a fondant roller, you really need to do this by hand.
So we wrapped the fondant in wax paper and kept it overnight for when we were ready for rolling out! I used Illustrator to create the templates for our fondant toppers.
Here is Becca, working on Wonder Woman.
I had to rework the Superman, but I think I got it.
So make cupcakes, and pipe some frosting on them. Ideally, these would have had bigger muffin tops.
Tomorrow I’ll show you a few behind the scenes photos, as well as how to make the pretzel rods and pie we made for the shoot – stay tuned!
[addtoany] Yum