Bra biscuits!

I was recently asked to provide 200 biscuits for the Breast Cancer Care Charity Ball in Huntingdon.  This was put together by my wonderful cousin Susan Rushworth.  She is such a hard-working and lovely person, it's no surprise that this was a fantastic event.  I ate some incredible food, listened to some awesome music and met some really inspiring people.

I found this on the Flickr page for the Applegum Kitchen where 
I also found a number of other delights

After scouring the internet for ideas, I happened to stumble across possible the best mould I've ever seen.  My various google searches for "underwear moulds" had retrieved a number of unwanted results so I was so pleased when I found what I was after. I hastily bought it from
Design - A - Cake  and pretty much sat by the letterbox until it arrived.

It took a number of different methods before I was able to properly bang these out.  I found that putting trex on the mould was not a good idea as it made it stick more.  Dusting it with cornflour tended to work but made the paste look a bit dull.  Eventually I found that using the better quality sugarpaste (Regalice) as opposed to own brand supermarket ones tended to have the highest success rate.  It's also important to make sure you clean the mould every now and then to stop sticking.

I made sure I began making all the components to these biscuits way in advance.

Bras were made a few weeks before and dusted a few days before bagging.

Biscuits were made about a week before and frozen

Tags were hand written (thanks mum, thanks Tom) a few days before.

Assembling of the finished product was done a few days before so that they would be as fresh as possible but with a few days spare for any emergencies!

I knew that it would be silly to expect my ancient little oven to be able to cope with all the biscuits, so my mum kindly let me use hers.  I tend to stick the the Hummingbird Bakery's sugar cookie recipe whenever I make biscuits that I'm going to decorate intricately as they're really sturdy and always taste delicious.

And so, several bags of sugar and flour later, I had over 200 heart shaped cookies which were left to cool and then bagged up and stored in the freezer.

On the evening of the icing and bagging, I experienced what it might be like to run my own factory.  Thanks to the help of my wonderful boyfriend, friends and mum, we were able to get an incredibly effective production line going!  As I iced the biscuits, my factory workers (!) threaded tags, curled ribbon, spread buttercream on the biscuits, bagged and tied, so that 9 hours after we began, the mission was complete.

I began by colouring up my sugarpaste until it was a pale pink.  I then rolled it out and cut out hearts using the same cutter I had used for the biscuits.  These were then attached to the biscuits using a very thin layer of buttercream.  I then used a smoother to make it really flat and neat.

I then let down some sugarpaste until it was thin enough to pipe and then piped dots onto the back of the bras before sticking them onto the hearts.  I found this to be the best way to attach them.

Meanwhile in the room nextdoor...

carla threads!

paul curls!

And eventually, we ended up with a thoroughly pleasing sight...

                            

So a few days later we took them along to the Marriott Hotel where they were added as the finishing touches to each of the tables...

And so there we have it. Thanks to mum, Tom, Carla and Paul for all their help, also to Tom for the beautiful photos and a massive congratulations to Susan and all those who helped put on this wonderful event.  Can't wait til next year's one!