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:
Bake A Wish got a request for a Lego cake for a boy living in a shelter who was turning 11. I snapped up that request faster than you can say, “Lego is awesome but clearly designed to keep adults from safely walking barefoot through children’s rooms!”
I have a Lego minifig mold, which is obvious if you’ve seen my gummy work. I considered making gummy minifigs, but then decided to try more experiments with the chocolate gummy. However, the experiments using white chocolate weren’t working out so well and the deadline loomed, so I put that stuff away for another day and went back to focusing on this cake.
I also have a mold for Lego-like bricks, but quickly realized that it’s off scale. The bricks are too big, and while the bumps are about the right size, they’re too small relative to the bricks. Since the minifig mold is to scale, that rendered the brick mold unusable for this cake:
The blue brick was made with fondant in the mold. The yellow brick is real Lego.
To make this cake Lego-worthy, I realized I’d have to make all of the bumps by hand. Yes, that is insane. But this kid asked for a Lego cake and by jove, he was going to get a Lego cake!
I wanted the base cake to look as if it had classic green baseplates around it, so I rolled out some green fondant (in this case, Satin Ice because I had it leftover from the cake show), measured out 8×4 inch panels at 1/4″ thick, then pressed a real (and completely clean) Lego baseplate on them to indent them with the right placement for bumps later. I set those aside to dry for a couple of days.
Then, when they were definitely firm, I started cutting out little dots. I tested different round piping tips against the real Lego and figure a #8 would probably be about right, but I didn’t have one, so I used one of my mini circle cutters instead. A tip would be better: the circle cutter required each bump to be pushed out with the end of a brush, and then tapped back into shape. A tip would hopefully let it fall out the wider end without so much fuss. A tip will also be easier to find, so if you’re going to do this, that’d be the way to go.
I rolled out more of the green fondant to 1/8″ thick (using Mike McCarey’s genius methodology of inexpensive dowels) and got to cutting:
1/8" dowels are great inexpensive rolling guides!
Then I put a bit of piping gel on the indentations from the actual Lego, and pushed the bumps on to stick them down.
From left to right: the real Lego baseplate, a completed fondant baseplate, and a partially completed fondant one.
You can see the gel dots on the right hand side. The coloured bits were used to spell out the child's name in flat-brick style.
It took an awful lot of cutting. This is one of many hole-filled fondant sheets, which kind of looks cool in and of itself so there may be a lace-making technique in here somewhere:
It's like the Sea of Holes, except the wrong colour and there's no submarine in sight.
You can just make little balls and push them down instead of cutting, but they’ll be rounded instead of having a good, crisp edge like real Lego:
The second one down on the right side was made by rolling a small ball and pushing it down. You can clearly see that it's not as Lego-like as the ones that were cut with a cutter.
I made a buttermilk vanilla cake, covered and filled it with buttercream, and mounted it onto a red-fondant covered board (with black ribbon around the edge). I rolled out some more green, stamped it with the real baseplate again to impress the pattern on it, and put that on top. Then I applied the dried fondant baseplates all around:
Because the fondant baseplates were thick and dried, it was pretty easy to get them mounted in a stable fashion.
Once the baseplates were all on, I measured and inserted dowels to support the top tier.
That completed the bottom tier. Meanwhile, while things were drying, I made the chocolate minifigs. By “chocolate” I mean Wilton Candy Melts, so not really chocolate at all, but chocolate-like and it’s easier to just say chocolate so go with it.
I filled the cavities of the minifig ice tray with all blue and popped those out, and then with all red and did likewise. Then I heated a sharp knife in my gas torch to slice off the heads and hands. I put the bodies back in the mold, then added yellow to the hand and head cavities. Then I microwaved the whole thing slowly until it all melted together, fusing the heads and hands onto the bodies. When I did the first ones this way, I didn’t tap/jiggle the mold enough on the re-melt of the bodies, so some bubbles appeared. If you’re going to do this, you really need to thoroughly re-melt the bodies, and then tap and jiggle the mold until you actually see bubbles come up through the backs. It’s a bit of a pain but it’s worth it in the end.
The blue ones on the right have their heads and hands on, the red ones to the left aren't finished yet. There's a Matrix joke in there somewhere, I'm sure.
You could just put the colours all in the right places on the first go, but that will inevitably lead to swirling, which will mean you’ll have body colour up in the head and hands, and yellow into the body. The cutting method above ensures better edges. If I’d had more time, I have have mixed up some of the pants and torsos for better colour variation.
Then I added their faces. I tried to use black edible ink markers, which worked at first, but the fat in the chocolate kept defeating the markers. Eventually I gave up and painted on faces with Americolor Super Black gel, but I was worried that wouldn’t dry and would end up smeared. I was wrong, though: it dried fairly quickly and made for a good result (note that it was a dry day, so if you’re somewhere humid, you may have a different result).
My infernal army of edible Lego figures is coming along nicely. Muahahaha!
Not perfect, but acceptable.
For the top tier, I carved a house shape in more of the same cake and covered it with buttercream. I then covered that with yellow fondant and mounted it on the lower tier, hiding the edge of the upper tier’s base board with a thin rope of yellow fondant. I rolled out some black to fit and applied it as the roof, then cut strips of black to go against the side and look like the edges of roof tiles. I put two dowels down through the whole thing, then covered those with the triangular roof cap line.
I used a knife to mark out Lego-brick-sized lines all around the house to give the impression of being built out of Lego, and did likewise to the roof, using an actual shingle piece as a guide. I made a little red door and stuck it on, then mounted the minifigs with melted chocolate all around the cake. Anywhere on the green surface around the house that wasn’t taken by a minifig, I applied more green bumps to make it look like they were snapped on to actual Lego.
And here’s the result:
The recipient's name is blurred out for security/privacy reasons.
Those little guys are up to something. I can just feel it.
Anywhere where I could see between the base plates to the cake inside, I stuck some extra green fondant, which masked it nicely.
Okay if you light it up with a flash from below, you can see the extra stuff in the corners.
The buttercream did make the fondant on the house slightly uneven, but I reminded myself that this wasn't for competition so I didn't obsess about the imperfections. Much. *twitch*
There you have it! Or rather, there the recipient had it. I hope he liked it. As I’ve mentioned before, with these donated cakes, we drop them off to staff at the various facilities and never get to see the recipients. But hopefully he got the Lego cake he was hoping for.
Whenever we cook rice (which is almost always short grain, brown), we do 2 parts rice and 1 part barley. This started as an accident years ago and turned out to be super-tasty.
Next time you’re cooking brown rice, substitute in a third of it for barley. You’ll dig it.
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.
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 really am working on the stained glass gummy book. Really really. I’ve almost finished the first full draft and I’ve got all the pictures done.
I was going to work on it some more this evening but Bake A Wish sent out a desperate plea for a cake donation that nobody was picking up. Usually people vie for slots, so it was really odd that a cake was due tomorrow (by which I mean today, since it’s after midnight) and nobody had said they’d do it. A girl at a shelter was turning 16 and wanted a strawberry cake with a Hello Kitty theme. The Bake A Wish folks – who usually require home-baked cakes with home-made buttercream – were so desperate they were begging someone to buy a bakery cake and stick a plastic Hello Kitty on it.
No. I couldn’t let that happen.
So I called and said I’d do it. Quick, quick, emergency cake decorating needed!
I had to go shopping for ingredients since I hadn’t been planning to bake this week and since I don’t usually make strawberry cakes. I bought a mix and added extra real strawberries to it, all mashed up. I’ve done that before and it’s turned out okay (too sweet for me but kids seem to love it). I also added some Americolor Electric Pink to the mix so the cake will look bright pink inside, aside from the strawberry chunks. I figured that goes well with Hello Kitty.
Being so short on time, I couldn’t do anything fancy and even decided to go buttercream only, which I don’t really ever do on full-sized cakes. I mean, ever. And it turns out I’m mediocre at getting a nice even buttercream layer. I even goofed and got a couple crumbs up from the crumb coat. I considered trying to hide that by doing a frozen buttercream transfer but our freezer is jammed full.
In the end, I think I did okay with Hello Kitty herself (I printed off a picture from a Google image search and lightly traced it onto the white buttercream with a toothpick). A quick pair of star borders in more Electric Pink to hide my bad white icing job and voila, emergency Hello Kitty cake is ready to be driven to the other side of town in about 12 hours:
Not fancy, has some mistakes, but I say this still beats just sticking a plastic Hello Kitty on.
Here’s to hoping the birthday girl likes it! We rarely find out through Bake A Wish; most drop-offs are at the front desk of the shelters or group homes and we never see the recipients themselves.
Now I’ll do a bit of book work before I crash out for bedtime…I really am working on it, I promise!
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.
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!
That title is drool-worthy enough to stop right there, I know, but collect yourselves so we can get this party started!
I was going to make myself regular French Toast for breakfast. For me that means 4 eggs, 1/4 cup of Splenda (the baking kind you measure like sugar), a blort of milk, a pinch of salt, a hefty shake of cinnamon, and about a quarter of a whole nutmeg freshly ground with a microplane grater. Our regular bread is Orrowheat 100% Whole Wheat. I soak the pieces, lube up the pan with some butter, fry and done. Simple, reasonably diabetic-friendly, tasty.
But when I went into the kitchen today, I spied three bananas on the counter, their skins starting to brown. I only like to eat bananas when they’ve still got hints of green on the peel, because I don’t like overly sweet stuff. And I’m too busy at the moment to make banana muffins or bread, plus the freezer’s already full of bananas waiting for such purposes.
So I hustled back over to my computer and Googled around and found Martha Stewart’s Banana Nut French Toast.
Now I’m sure that using heavy cream and challah and pre-toasting the nuts and all of that is quite lovely. In fact I know from when I do make challah that it is, by far, the best thing to use for French Toast. But I didn’t have that stuff and I didn’t want to turn the oven on and take time to roast the nuts. Plus, Peo was looking for some attention so I took Martha’s recipe as a launch point and winged it after that with Peo’s help.
The result was tasty, but needs refinement, so I’m not posting it as an official recipe just yet. But here’s what we did, so replicate/change as you wish!
First we peeled two of the three bananas and mashed them up with a fork:
Mashing food is fun, especially when your mom isn't telling you to stop.
Then we added a cup of milk (which turned out to be too much…I think a half cup would have been better) and since Peo would be sharing this with me, I added a total of six eggs:
When mixing the milk into the banana, Peo giggled that it was "so disgusting but smells so good!"
We beat that together, added a third cup of Splenda (which also turned out to be too much, but those of you with a sweet tooth probably would have liked it just fine). The bananas were so sweet I think an under-filled quarter cup would have been plenty. And of course, others can use real sugar if they want, but I’d be ill if I had that much, even with all of the protein from the eggs.
Then I shook in some cinnamon and about a third of a nutmeg grated up:
Measurements? We don't need no steenkin' measurements!
Then we set that mixture aside and peeled the last banana. Peo cut it up:
She finds this task very appealing. She'll also be very happy that I included that pun in this post.
I then put a piece of bread on a plate and told Peo that this would be her sandwich, so she should put on as many bananas and walnuts as she wanted. I already had walnuts chopped up in a bag in the fridge for my regular pancakes, so that was easy. Peo decided she wanted to go minimal so she could make a face:
Pareidolia Sandwich was having a great day, blisfully unaware of what was to come...
Then I had Peo put another slice of bread over it and squeeze the whole thing together:
"First Mom tells me to mash bananas and now squeeze a sandwich? When did cooking get to be so much destructive fun?" Okay, she didn't really say that...what she said was, "SQUEEEEEEEEEZE!"
I said, “Okay, let’s put it in the egg mixture.”
Peo asked, “Will it sink or float?”
I said, “Only one way to find out!”
Peo said, “WITH SCIENCE!”
She cried out, "It floats!" Science wins again!
Then we flipped it over to coat both sides, and let it sit while we prepped the pan.
See? Your computer totally needs Scratch'n'Sniff, doesn't it?
I keep a stick of butter in the fridge dedicated to pan use. That way I can just grab it by the wax paper wrapper and rub it on the pan for the lightest bit of transfer without piling on tons of fat and calories. Peo helped me rub the pan with the butter stick, then I carefully lifted the quickly-soggifying sandwich out of the bowl and into the pan.
Not long now!
I fried it on a low-ish setting until it was brown on both sides. Meanwhile, we prepped the next sandwich and got it soaking in the mix.
When this first one was ready I took it out and sliced it to Peo’s specifications: it had to be “symmetrical” with “no wiggly cuts”. Right. I’m not sure if I achieved symmetry but it was at least a straight cut down the middle:
I served it on Peo's Magic Plate. This is seriously a genius move, parents: go to Goodwill and let your kid pick out a special plate that's just for them. It'll cost you about a buck and might be part of a previously high-end set. If it's got a gilded edge like this, you can't use it in the microwave, but don't worry about dishwashing it because hey, it was a buck. Tell your kid it's now their Magic Plate and all food you serve on it is absolutely delicious. Don't serve anything on it you know they hate, but use it to get them to try new stuff. Totally works.
Peo tried it tentatively at first…
A special placemat won from the Buddy Buck machine at HEB doesn't hurt either.
But then started noming it happily while also telling jokes:
Yeah, my kid is talking with her mouth full. She's also eating new food that she helped cook. I pick my parenting battles.
Here’s my sandwich out of the pan a few minutes later. It got more of the banana chunks stuck to the outside. It looks like you need to work to keep them in the solution and not all sinking to the bottom.
Mine had a more even layer of banana slices and chopped walnuts. The crunch inside was very pleasant.
Now for the problems: as mentioned above, there was too much milk and this came out a bit too sweet. Even Peo, who ate most of her sandwich quickly, eventually declared that it was a bit too sweet as well. But that may be my fault for seeding the idea in her head when I mentioned that mine was too sweet. I think her problem was more that it was very rich and heavy with all of that egg, so she filled up quickly.
It also makes way too much for our needs. I ate two whole sandwiches (this was actually my breakfast and lunch all together), but there was still lots of the mixture left over. I dunked the bread bums (our word for the ends of the loaf) and fried those up as well:
The end of the loaf dunked in the mixture and fried up, no other bananas or nuts added.
But without the nuts, it wasn’t quite as good. If I was going to do this recipe again but not as a sandwich, I’d sprinkle some nuts on the single bread piece while it’s goo-side-up in the pan.
And there’s valid reason to do it as single pieces: I found the interior of the sandwiches a bit mushy for my liking. Then again, I like to thin my pancake batter enough that there’s no mushy interior there either, and I know some people covet that slightly-underdone moist inside, so tailor it to your tastes.
I think it’d work really well to dunk the bread and fry it, then assemble a sandwich with slices and nuts in between after.
When I was recipe-hunting, I also saw varieties that pour the egg mixture over the bread, banana, and nuts in a baking dish, let it soak up overnight, and then bake the whole thing. That idea has merit as well, but takes a lot more planning than I usually bother with.
I ended up putting some of the mixture into the fridge to experiment with another day, so we’ll see how adventurous I feel tomorrow or Monday.
Give it a go with your own preferences and let me know how it turns out!
Peo went to two birthday parties this weekend. Both served vanilla cake. Yesterday, she liked vanilla cake. Today, she cried when there was no chocolate option, insisting that vanilla is “too filling”. This is probably because yesterday she had lunch, then went to the party, then bowled, then had pizza, then had cake. No amount of logic would dissuade her from the conclusion that vanilla cake is “too filling”.
The only way I could get her to stop crying was to promise her to see if any of the chocolate cake I had in the freezer was still good. I knew I had two 5″ rounds leftover from early December, but wasn’t 100% sure they wouldn’t be freezer-burned.
Thankfully, because of solid wrapping that kept the air off of them, they’re fine. I pulled one out and let it thaw on the counter for about an hour.
But I had no icing in the house, and the mixing bowl is in the pile of dirty dishes that I didn’t feel like getting to this evening. Not that I wanted to make a large batch of buttercream anyway.
So I tossed a generous handful of chocolate chips into a bowl with a tablespoon of butter, microwaved it gradually, and vaguely sort of hand-whipped it with a silicone spatula. Then I slapped that on the mostly-thawed cake and dumped a pile of sprinkles on top. Behold instacake:
Once again, a reminder that licking your monitor isn't healthy for you or the monitor.
Is this going to win any awards for decorating or fancy flavours? No. Is anyone going to wax poetic on the nature of the crumb or decadence of the topping? Hardly. Is this going to launch my career as a professional cake baker? Hah!
But is the six-year-old happy?
Yup.
WIN!
And mama’s pretty pleased with the results too.
