I’ll be posting links in the sidebars and doing more promotion later today, but for now my loyal readers (all six of you!) get first crack at my newly released ebook on how to do the stained glass technique with gummy:
Click the cover above to go to a page with more details, or if you just can’t wait, use the link below to go buy it now:
Categories: Cake Decorating · Cookies · Cupcakes and Mini Cakes · Experimental Techniques · Fancy cakes · General Freakishness · Gummy · My Recipes
I’ve recreated the old gummy tutorial from my kimberlychapman.com website here on Eat The Evidence, including some updated tips and photos, plus a photo-free version for easy printing:
Basic Gummy Recipe and Tutorial
It is now linked from both the Recipe Archive and Gummy pages as well, for future reference.
Categories: Gummy · My Recipes · Working With Kids
I will be doing two demonstrations of my gummy techniques in May:
1) May 12, Austin Mini Maker Faire.
2) May 20, Texas ICES Day of Sharing in Fort Worth.
Both have tickets available now (I don’t get paid for either other than travel costs for Fort Worth, these are benefits for non-profits).
Even if you’ve seen my demos in Austin or Houston, there’ll be new stuff to see that I’ve only developed recently, so come learn to make fun treats!
I was in the middle of a bunch of posts about the main gummy recipes since this week I developed a good clear gummy recipe as part of that flexible, edible stained glass ebook I’m working on. Then I got sidetracked by ensuring the recipes provided accurate measurements of gelatin for those not using pre-packed envelopes.
Then tonight I made Accidental Pie, which was the culmination of an error from earlier in the week.
Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start…
Opaque gummy (which has a recipe in the Zombie Skin post for now until I actually get formatted recipes up) uses 5 envelopes of gelatin in sweetened, condensed milk. Not evaporated milk. No.
So there I was making some opaque gummy so I could do step-by-step photos for the stained glass ebook, but I was going fast because I needed to go pick my daughter up from school. I was also tired and under the influence of allergy meds. I grabbed a can out of the pantry, discovered that our can opener was dying, and used it to hack open the can partway.
See, if I’d been able to open the can fully, I’d have noticed it was evaporated milk and not sweetened condensed milk. The former is very liquid, the latter is goopy.
But I didn’t notice. I poured it. It splashed. I said [Many Rude Words]. Then I put plastic over the whole thing and went and picked my daughter up.
When I got home, it was cooled to room temperature, and kind of like too-soft gummy. Sigh. I put the whole pot in the fridge to deal with later, and made some proper opaque gummy to finish working on the photos for the ebook.
Two days later I searched around for recipes that involved unflavoured gelatin and evaporated milk. There were a lot of cheesecakes. I don’t like cheesecake (hey, don’t complain…that leaves more for you!). There were some pies that involved one or two envelopes of gelatin. I’d used five. But I evaluated a few different things and decided to make Accident Pie, which would be melting some chocolate into the milk-gummy mix and putting that in a pie shell with whipped cream on top. This was partly because I had a spare pre-made bit of pie dough in the freezer that needed to be used soon anyway.
So I baked the pie crust as per the box’s directions, then let it cool thoroughly. Then I took out the pot with the mistake-mix and it was a solid lump. Hrm. I began to have doubts about this, but was committed, so I slowly melted it over low heat.
Incidentally, while it was melting, my husband and I ran some tests with LEDs embedded in gummy. So that’s yet another post I need to make.
Once it was melted, I put in 12 oz of semi-sweet chocolate chips (standard bags are about 11.5 oz) and mixed until it was all a nice even liquid.
Then I poured it into the pie shell, and it promptly found its way through two cracks in the crust and ended up everywhere in the dish. Whoops. Heh.
Then I stuck that whole thing in the fridge overnight. Tonight I pulled it out of the fridge about two hours before dinner, then made some basic whipped cream (whip a 8oz/1 cup pack of heavy cream in a chilled bowl until thick, then add a tsp of vanilla and tbsp of powdered sugar, whip that in, done!) and plopped it on top.
The result?
Behold! Accident Pie!
Now before you get too excited by how good that looks, you need to understand that the reason the sides are so smooth is that the chocolate part is very chewy. Too chewy for pie, to be honest. How chewy is it? So chewy that Peo’s laughing in this picture because I’ve just made another loud Wookie-yell noise:
Star Wars jokes and chocolate pie? Why don't I have a Mom of the Millenium trophy?
It’s also pretty sticky, not in the stick-to-your-finger way, but in the could-use-this-as-glue way. In this photo, you can see where it leaked under the pie shell and glued the crust to the dish:
You can peel that stuff off the pie dish pretty easily, and the peelings are tasty, but they don't look nice.
This same recipe with one or two envelopes of gelatin would be quite tasty. As it is, it’s acceptable, but not awesome.
But more importantly, what we all agreed on was this: I just accidentally invented chocolate gummy.
Did you read that fully? CHOCOLATE GUMMY. Not chocolate-covered gummy; there’s plenty of that around. No, I mean gummy candy that is also chocolate.
Whoa. This is going to need a lot of further experimentation. So many questions need to be answered! Will it dry like other gummy? If so, will it stay flexible, or crack? Will it bond to other gummy? How well does it form to molds? Should I add a bit of sugar to make it a bit more sweet, or maybe corn syrup? Will it form a semi-solid state that will allow for piping/extruding, the way regular gummy does not? How many nerd points do I get if I make chocolate gummy Lego minifigs? And who will help me eat all of the results?
Stay tuned…gummy just got a whole lot niftier.
Categories: Experimental Techniques · General Freakishness · Gummy · My Recipes
I’m working on a post for my new clear gummy recipe and the recipe template program I use has a pull-down menu for units that doesn’t include “envelope” (it has “packet” but that means different things to different people). I measure Knox unflavoured gelatin for the gummy by the envelope (you can use store brand, but I’ve found Knox to have better clarity, and I buy it in large packs from Amazon).
To be accurate for recipe purposes, and to assist those of you who aren’t buying it in envelopes or are in other countries where the envelopes may vary, I figured I should look up how much is in an envelope. Knox’s official website says, “1 pouch is about 2 1/2 teaspoons (7g) unflavoured gelatine. If a recipe calls for 1 tablespoon, use 1 pouch of unflavoured gelatine. Each pouch will gel 2 cups (500mL) of liquid and up to 1 1/2 (375mL) cups of solids.”
But that website is kind of old, and the Kraft version of the website doesn’t state the amount per envelope at all (other than if you do the math that an 8 oz box of 32 envelopes means 0.25 oz per envelope, which is about 7g).
Thus, being the skeptic-minded person I am, I went and measured. I emptied an envelope into one of my little shot-glass measuring cups, then tapped and spun it gently to get a level surface. I had some trouble getting good photos, but as you can see, there’s no way that’s 2 1/2 tsp. It’s not even 2.
This photo taken with a flash shows that it's slightly over 1 1/2 tablespoons but a bit under 2 teaspoons.
This photo without a flash makes it look closer to 1 1/2 tablespoons but the top layer is glowing a bit.
Having seen it with the naked eye, I’d call it a bit under 2 tsp.
I then measured it by weight on our digital scale, pouring it from the shot glass into a little glass dish that I’d tared out to zero first. It flickered between 5g and 6g at first until it settled on 6g. Just to be thorough, I got a fresh envelope and weighed that: 8g (but that includes the paper). Then I tared the shot glass, and poured the fresh envelope into that. That flickered between 6g and 7g. It is possible that enough stuck inside the shot glass when I poured it into the second glass dish to have lowered the first measurement.
The official weight per envelope is 7g. There isn’t a significant difference, so I’ll concede to the official weight as 7g per envelope, but there’s no way it’s 2 1/2 tsp. Even the second envelope was still a little under 2 tsp for volume.
Therefore, if you’re going to measure your own gelatin for any of my recipes (and since I just noticed Amazon’s out of stock of the bulk envelopes I may have to convert to the cans myself), here’s how you should count it:
1 envelope of Knox gelatine = 7g or just under 2tsp.
So for basic gummy, which uses 4 envelopes: 28g or about 2 1/2 tbsp.
I’m very interested in finding out what measurements people get elsewhere for the envelopes. So if you have a moment to spare, check them out and let me know!
This is my summary of my and Peo’s stuff from this year’s big cake show in Austin.
My main entry was a completely new technique I invented that I call Flexible, Edible Stained Glass. I recreated John William Waterhouse’s “The Lady of Shalott” in a stained-glass look using gummy medium, all mounted on a plexiglass backing so it could be displayed upright but that the judges would still be able to flex it. Unfortunately, for some unknown reason, the judges decided to penalize me for using the plexiglass even though structures are allowed in that category (Special Techniques Not On A Cake) and other structures such as picture frames have been used in the past without penalty. As a result, I won no awards this year. On the upside, a lot of other people – including some highly influential celebrity bakers like Mike McCarey – did like it, and I demonstrated the methodology for them. I’ll be generating a PDF/ebook of the technique for sale in the next few weeks, so stay tuned to this blog if you’re interested in learning how to do it.
Here’s the piece partially complete, so you can see the plexiglass backing:
Partial Lady of Shalott in Flexible, Edible Stained Glass
Here it is complete with backlighting from my kitchen window:
Lady of Shalott glowing from behind
Detail of the Lady:
Lady of Shalott - Detail
Here’s the piece at the show, unlit:
I deliberately allowed the plexiglass to curve to highlight the flexibility while also keeping it upright.
Corran bodged me some battery-driven LEDs on the Friday night so I could light it up on Saturday. Here it is lit up (and slightly blurry since I didn’t have a tripod handy, but the official show photographer did some tricks with lighting to get a glowing version so I’ll post that once I get it myself):
Lighting it is tricky, because too much drowns out the foreground details, but insufficient light and you can't see the translucent nature of the medium.
My other piece was what I’d long been calling my Mike McCarey homework. Mike liked the fondant canework I did on my 2010 Alien Film Festival show cake and told me that year that he wanted to see me experiment with modelling chocolate canes. I didn’t get a chance to do so for the 2011 show, but since I didn’t do a massive cake this year, I was able to play around with it. I’ll post more details of those experiments later, but here’s the somewhat rough cake I made as my homework (rough mostly because I’ve had pneumonia for the past week and a half):
I titled it "Emerging Rainbows" because I used various rainbow techniques that appear to be popping out all over the place, plus the egg implies something may emerge.
Here’s the lower tier of that in progress, where you can see that I built up layers of colours that I could then cut into as with candle-carving techniques:
Pareidolia Cake is shocked!
Here is my daughter Peo’s cake. She’s six, and wanted to do Lumiere as a free-standing figure, but I had to convince her that mounting weight on skinny arms was a highly advanced project that would require stages of drying time, so she eventually agreed to do him lying down. I wasn’t home when she made him, but I did teach her in advance to use a printout as a guide and Corran reports that she did that very well. I think this is awesome figure sculpting for a little kid!
Lumiere Cake by Peo
After the show, one of my multi-year-earned mega-volunteer perks was to assist in Mike McCarey’s classes. For his guitar class today, he insisted he didn’t need much help so I should take the class; Mike’s not only the greatest decorator on the planet ever, he’s probably also the nicest. And definitely one of the greatest teachers.
So here we are posing with the guitar cake I made:
Hrm, a guitar cake...as a volunteer for the Biscuit Brothers, this is a skill that might come in handy someday!
Here are some more photos of it at home:
Not bad airbrushing for someone who hasn't done any airbrushing since age 14, when I sucked at it so bad that I was determined never to try again!
Guitar body. Most of it is modelling chocolate, but the red covering is fondant. I'm not telling you what the strings are; you'll have to take his class for that secret! But they are edible.
Guitar detail.
Now I’m going to relax for a few days! Then I’ll get to work on that ebook of the stained glass technique.
Categories: Cake Decorating · Experimental Techniques · Fancy cakes · Gummy · Working With Kids
I’ve been wondering for some time if I could make nice, round ropes of gummy by running a stream of it into cold water. Today I gave it a shot, and the short answer is nope, it doesn’t work.
The longer answer is this:
I used water chilled and filtered by my fridge, placed atop two ice packs. You can see from the photo below that it was chilled, but far from frozen:
If the gummy had held together but simply not hardened quickly enough at this temperature, I'd have tried colder water.
I decided to start with this because it was easy and readily available. Our freezer’s so full right now that there’s no room to run the ice maker. I figured if this got close, I’d do another test later with ice water.
But as soon as I started actually running the gummy (which I let cool as much as possible without starting to become solid) into the water, I realized the fatal flaw in this plan: much as it seems like it’s coming out in a stream when I work with it, it’s really not, or not for long. It breaks up into drops which then amass together in molds. Even a running stream held close to a mold is actually fluctuating. This is why the Mythbusters were able to show that you can’t electrocute yourself urinating on an electric fence or third rail of a subway: there isn’t a solid, continuous line of fluid far from the source.
So the gummy hit the water in drops, which made it float around in individual amorphous blobs. Even when I put pressure on the flow to make it more continuous, the line still broke into drops upon hitting the water’s surface. And even when I could almost sort of get a line going, it folded over itself so readily that it formed lumpy piles, not a nice single rope.
The gummy has broken up in the water and then puddled in lumps at the bottom, which are now soaking up more water as they sit there.
This is a close-up of the gummy on one side where I did manage to almost get it flowing down into the water in a steady stream. But it simply piled up on itself and formed a solid chunk around the bottom edge of the bowl.
A side-view of the bowl. There are lots of wispy strands of gummy slowly sinking into the water, but they're about the thickness of sewing thread for the most part, and break at the slightest touch.
Here you can see the delicate lumps I was able to fish out of the bowl. Sure, there are a couple of strings hanging off, but they’re super-fragile and inconsistent in diameter.
Despite the hanging threads, these are not coils that can be teased apart. They are fused lumps, and very wet. They could possibly be dried out, but would shrink substantially in doing so. Also, these are very delicate and fall into smaller chunks easily.
I don’t think colder water would have much effect, because the gummy liquid is simply insufficiently viscous to hold its shape in the fluid. If I make it thicker with more gelatin, it would pull more water into itself quickly and still end up weak and breaking apart.
So nope, I don’t think you can use a cold water bath to form extruded ropes of gummy. Oh well…a negative result is still good information!
Categories: Experimental Techniques · Gummy
My Jello Americans has a cool video and tutorial on how to make Jello “Origami” using gelatin sheets.
They do admit that they’re “faking” the origami insofar is it’s the shape of the final orgami crane, not an actual piece folded that much, but it’s still wicked cool and you can’t really tell.
I’m betting their site is full of other gummy-related goodness too. I think I need to go make friends with them!
Categories: General Freakishness · Gummy · Links · Other People's Experiments · Other People's How-Tos
Zombie apocalypse got you down? Hordes of the greenie-gutses trying to storm your compound and eat your tasty, tasty brains? Well I did some experimenting and I’ve found a way for you to bite those undead back with Zombie Skin Cake!
After accidentally discovering how to make something akin to flesh using a basic gummy recipe a couple of weeks ago, I immediately wanted to do something gross for Halloween. I took that gummy hand to my demonstration at the Houston Day of Sharing and it was a huge hit so I told several people I was going to do a zombie thing that week.
I had a cunning plan that couldn’t possibly fail: last year when I was looking for green licorice laces (as opposed to twists) so I could use them as light strings along with candy-coated sunflower seeds on the Biscuit Brothers holiday cake, I was only able to find red and black laces in several stores all over town. So this year I decided I’d go back to one of those same stores and get the black laces, make some easy chunks of gummy zombie skin, and lace it all together.
The problem was I went to all of those stores and not a single one had licorice laces. GAHHH. This delayed the project by a week while I got caught up with other stuff.
Then last week I needed to make 3 dozen cupcakes for a Bake a Wish donation, so I figured I’d reserve a bit of batter from that and whip up a 5″ little cake just for experimental purposes. My husband said he’d seen licorice laces at Central Market, so I checked and found licorice wheels and decided that was as close as I was going to get, so I bought some.
I filled and covered the 5″ cake with red buttercream, then started making the zombie skin starting with a pretty easy opaque base:
Opaque Gummy Base
Put the water in a nonstick pot and add the gelatin powder. Allow to bloom (it will absorb all the water and become solid). Heat pot slowly over low heat and add hot water in 10ml doses until the whole thing is melted and liquid (will probably take 20-30ml of water total). Add the sweetened condensed milk and mix thoroughly. Heat until warm (NOT BOILING).
Once you’ve got that mixed up, you can immediately use the baster to squirt some onto a heat-safe mat for some sickly-flesh-toned pieces. Take a bit out and put it in a separate bowl and add a tiny, tiny, TINY drop of green. Mix and use the baster to make sheets of that as well. Mix more from the pot in if you like to create different tones of the same colour. Repeat with blue (although it takes a bit more blue to get blueish-green, because the sweetened condensed milk has so much of a yellow hue).
Here’s what a whole batch of varied-tone opaque gummy splotches looks like:
Variations in colour due to small amounts of foam or cross-colouring just add to the look.
While that cooled thoroughly on the counter, I began prepping the laces by splitting the licorice wheels:
This turned out to be harder than expected; they split a lot, creating barbs and coming out fairly sticky.
I roughly tore some chunks of the skin so they’d have ragged edges. Then I got my needle tool and prepared to poke holes that I could then stitch through with the laces:
Oh yeah, this is the kitchen of a normal, sane, upstanding member of the community. *mad cackling*
The first few stitches went fairly well although I quickly learned that I needed to put them further apart than originally desired, because the gummy was fragile and tearing.
I worked and worked and worked, becoming increasingly frustrated with the licorice, both in splitting it and in finding the barbs were tearing the gummy and making the sewing much more difficult than it would have been had I found actual laces.
But eventually I got this:
Phew, that took awhile and was fiddly, but it looks cool!
I had the cake in the fridge, hoping the firm buttecream would hold a nice edge during the gummy application. I spritzed it to make it slightly sticky, then tried to flip the gummy-licorice-net-thing on it…and this happened:
Insert copious quantities of swear words here.
That made me mad, and it was after midnight, so I briefly tried straightening it out as best I could while exhausted:
Hrm...meh.
Then I decided to call it a night and put the whole thing in the fridge so I could go to bed.
The next day I started pulling it apart, determined to try something else. As expected, the red from the buttercream transferred to the gummy and made it look wonderfully gross’n'gory on the inside:
Mmm, meaty.
Incidentally, how much does it cost to put one's offspring through a lifetime of therapy after witnessing their mother play with fake skin and blood? I'm asking for a friend, honest...
So enough with that whole licorice nonsense! I pulled the whole thing apart and discarded the licorice. The only benefit of it at this point was that it stained the skin in places which gave some great nasty colouring effects all over it. I rearranged the skin bits anew, but they’d become stiff enough overnight that they didn’t want to contour to the cake, so I had to stick ‘em in place with toothpicks:
Undead Franken-porcupine or the product of the unholy union of a zombie and Pinhead? You be the judge.
I left it to sit for a couple of hours while I worked on the accordion cake for Weird Al, hoping the skin would relax. It didn’t. So I got mad and brought out the Crafty Hair Dryer of Doom (which to my knowledge has never been used on hair, because I’m the kind of gal who owns such a device purely for it’s crafting potential and for whom a fancy hairstyle means a braid rather than a fast scrunchie-held bun). I aimed the heat at any point that was sticking out and softened it enough to make it BEND TO MY WILL. This also melted the buttercream underneath enough that it started oozing, which I’ll pretend was intended all along.
Once it was all squishy, I stuck it back in the fridge to firm back up. After about half an hour I took it back out and was able to remove the toothpicks and all of the gummy skin stayed in place. Yay!
I piped some black buttercream through a #2 tip between the holes as faux stitches, which worked much better since it remained flat (whereas the licorice was bulky enough to keep the gummy off of the cake in many places).
Behold: the ultra-gross mini cake of stitched-zombie-skin yuckitude!
Ew! Awesome!
Yuck! Yay!
And you know what’s even more delightfully disgusting than the outside of a zombie-skin-blood-gross cake?
THE INSIDE!
Now that, my friends, is a bleedin' mess. Woot!
For the record, the gummy is a bit of a pain to cut; it wants to push down into the cake instead of slicing. You need a really sharp knife and you have to stab through with the pointy bit and hold the cake as you saw. No, really. You MUST stab and saw this cake. Whether or not you pretend you’re at Dexter’s ultimate birthday party is up to you.
Here’s the slice that was cut out:
Try to eat my brains, will ya? I'll eat your skin first! NOM NOM NOM! And for the record, yes, I do own a brain mold so this could go both ways...
Evidence consumed, and left a gory plate behind:
I particularly like how wretchedly meaty the holes appear from the underside of the skin.
Conclusions:
I have more experiments to do with fake skin, zombie skin, and some other Halloween ideas to come. Until then, experiment yourself and remember: if it all goes wrong and you can’t fix it, eat the evidence and nobody will know!
Categories: Cake Decorating · Cupcakes and Mini Cakes · Experimental Techniques · Fancy cakes · General Freakishness · Gummy · My Recipes · Severe Nerdery · Sick and Twisted
Oh look, a beautiful bit of churchy stained glass in a window.
Let’s have a closer look, shall we?
Hang on…
That’s no moon stained glass. It’s a space station bunch of gummies.
It’s a bunch of Han Solo in Carbonite gummies in rainbow colours made to look like stained glass.
Crap, one of 'em is upside down. Click for a larger pic.
Yes, I am that wrong.
The idea came to me and I was amused, so I did it the day before I went down to the Houston cake club’s Day of Sharing (more on that later) so I could serve up these and the remainder gummies made from each colour batch to the attendees. I covered some acetate sheets in plastic wrap and stuck the gummies on, then put another sheet over the top to hold them there and used packing tape to tighten the sides and stick the whole business on our back door.
MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Maybe I should use this as a new header graphic or something. It’s like a nerd-pride banner of sweet rainbow goodness:
Guess he's not Solo anymore eh? Eh? See what I did there? Okay I'm tired, never mind...
Am I the only one who desperately wants an animated version to start doing a Rockettes number set to Weird Al’s “Perform This Way”? Okay, probably, yeah…
Categories: Experimental Techniques · General Freakishness · Gummy · Severe Nerdery · Sick and Twisted
