An adventure begins

Tonight I felt right about starting my journey toward excellence in cakemanship. I felt like playing with fondant, so I started with the Flip Flop Cupcakes. As of now, they seem to have lost their flip and are just a flop. Tomorrow when I take out the toweling under the straps out, hopefully they will look right. I just went back and tried to make them as perfect as I could. When I initially did them, I called it "good enough" even though they were uneven and slightly bent. If perfection is what I'm searching for, its what I need to strive for in every detail.

Having an extruder would be very helpful right now, because rolling a tiny rope of fondant into a uniform width is not easy at all. I don't want to get my butt kicked in this challenge due to lack of tools. I re-rolled the straps and I think they look much better.

I used my 5 petal cutter to make two small flowers for the flip flops, and I'm not loving the color. I'll redo them tomorrow. I don't have fuschia coloring, so I tried to take my pink and mix in a tiny touch of burgandy. Apparently, my burgandy is super strength, and the flowers are much too dark.

That's all for tonight. Not much in the way of progress, but at least I've finally started!

The Challenge Begins

I have the dream of a bakery inside my head. I have a lot of wonderul ideas that I would love to translate into cake, but the execution is never what I had hoped. In order to step away from mediocrity, I am taking a page from the movie, Julie & Julia, where a woman cooks her way through a famous chef's cookbook.

I am going to decorate my way through a cakebook.

Whose book was I going to choose? Collette? Sylvia? I headed to my local Barnes & Noble to scope out some titles. The selection on the shelf was slim, sadly, but luckily I found the book I was looking for: Confetti Cakes by Elisa Strauss. Her style is simple, clean, and flawless, exactly perfect for my taste. It contains 42 different cookies, cupcakes, mini cakes, and tiered cakes that are sure to give me a run for my money.

I will keep a blog about my adventures in this challenge. I will push my limits with fondant and gumpaste and hopefully emerge a more experienced, weathered decorator, ready to take the ideas out of my head and put them in sugar, where they belong.