Gelatin Flowers!

WOWEE! ELECTRO FLOWERS!

I have always shied away from gelatin in cooking because it's a bit weird.  You use it to make things wobbly and I never really understood it. So i suppose I have missed out on making a fair few flans and tarts. BUT I have most certainly made up for lost time by making FLOWERS out of the stuff!  I will apologise now for all the capital letters but the truth is, I just find it all a bit exciting.

The process of making gelatin decorations involves boiling up gelatin and mixing it with food colouring.  Using wire bent into different shapes, you then dip into the gooey gelatin, like you would with bubble mixture and then leave it to set and form a film.

You need a lot of patience to do this as you can be sitting there for AGES trying to get the gelatin to catch onto the wire and not just pop.  Once it has caught, there is a swirling motion needed to spread it all around evenly.

This spray took a number of hours to complete as it takes a long while to make all the individual parts, dip them, dry them, paint them, tape them.  They're quite sturdy and can withstand being dropped but it's reeeally easy to stick your finger through them too. Boo.

You can make all sorts of things using this method.  The mind boggles!

Rolo Cupcakes. Mmmmmmm

Well.  These babies went like hot hot cakes.  But, I'm not surprised because the middle of each one was a chocolately caramely gooey delight.  Just look at the UTTER JOY in Natty's face.

The massive milkshake craze that is sweeping the nation at the moment had got me thinking.  If i can literally chuck any chocolate bar into a milkshake then perhaps I can do the same with my cupcakes.  I don't imagine every type of chocolate bar will produce results as yummy as these but I'm more than happy to work my way through them and find out.

I used a nice light chocolate batter, popped a rolo in the middle of each cake and then covered it up before bunging them in the oven. And Bob was my uncle.

The taste of the middle bit reminded me a bit of the syrup sponge that we used to have at school which i absolutely loved.

I covered them all with some chocolate butter cream and topped each one with a chocolate heart.  I made these by melting up rolos and putting them into a heart shaped mould.  They looked really pretty as they had the streaks of caramel running through them creating a sort of marble effect.  When I ran out of rolos I went on to make some 'mystery chocolates' by melting up a load of Quality Street.

I've just bought some Crunchies and I'm going to try popping some of them in the middle next time, as well as crushing them up to make what I imagine will be an incredible icing!  Then I'll be trying some mars bar, followed by some lindt lindor........suggestions on a postcard please...

Sugar flowers

Before i learnt how to make sugar flowers I simply could not fathom how people could make something that was made out of sugar look so incredibly real and beautiful!  I now know that it takes an awful lot of time and patience and an awful lot of tools.  Some of the steps involved in making sugar flowers can literally take hours.  Personally I absolutely love getting stuck into making something, losing track of time.  I've heard several people say that they find projects like this really relaxing and I totally agree.  Once you've spent days following step after step, making petal after petal, gluing, taping, steaming, dusting, breaking, re-making, the end result can be really quite exciting!

Here is a spray I made recently. Yay!