Cake-decorating has never been one of my talents. I'm not very good with a piping bag. I'm not sure what the consistency of the frosting should be, or what happens to it under varying conditions. One granddaughter (the gymnast) wants "a fondant cake." I'm not very good with fondant, either.
Yes, I just could frost the cakes with cream cheese frosting and be done. But I won't.
Yesterday, I decided to try painting a fondant horse and a fondant unicorn with gel food coloring. It worked. Kinda.
I rolled out some fondant to about 1/4" thick, maybe thinner, on a silicone mat dusted with baking powder. I drew a horse on a piece of paper and used it as a pattern to cut out a horse head shape from the fondant, and started painting.
Painting on fondant is kind of like painting on glass; it's hard (impossible in my experience) to get even coverage. The gel moistens the fondant a little and changes the texture. You can stir a mud-hole in it if you're not careful. Light strokes and repeated coats (with drying time between coats) seem to be the keys.
I had trouble getting a good pink out of the red gel food coloring.
In any case, there's a fondant horse head (with feathers in its mane) and a colorful, sparkly unicorn head drying on the craft room table as we speak. They were supposed to be practice pieces, but I'm calling them good enough. (Despite my measuring, the horse's ears and the unicorn's horn are going to stick off the edge of the cake. Oh, well.) However, the party is not until Sunday, and I don't know how to store them. Should I freeze them, refrigerate them, or leave them out? Will they dry up if left out? What will happen to the fondant if frozen then thawed?
The search engine says to store them at room temperature in an air-tight container. These are good-sized horse heads, almost covering a 10" cake. (I wish I'd made them smaller, as adding names is going to be a challenge. Oh, well.) I don't own an air-tight container big enough to hold them. Plastic wrap will have to do.
Cross your fingers that I don't wreck them while trying to store them!
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Last night, about 10 p.m., I was sitting on the back porch, playing my bedtime game, when I heard the most god-awful SCREECH/squawk/growl I ever heard. And in the distance, something screeched back. Just about raised the hair on my neck. Had Sasquatch returned?
I stuck my head in the house and summoned The Husband. "Is it the groundhog?" I asked when he came out and heard it. He thought it might be a bird, and he went inside and got my phone and the big flashlight. The phone said, instantly, it's a barred owl. The Husband spotted them with the flashlight. There were TWO of them, sitting on the big grapevine that hangs like a trapeze in our back yard, and at least one more calling from a distance. We figure it was a parent and some babies.
We "know" these parent owls from regularly hearing their "hoots." But this squawking/screeching were calls I'd never heard from the old regulars.
Kinda cool. :)
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