Sneaky Bear

To make him I used the Wilton Teddy Bear pan to get the basic shape, pressing dyed rice crispie treats in with all my might to get a dense and strong shape, trying to pick up all of the details of the pan.

Turns out rice crispies really aren't that strong, so it was lucky I decided to paint this guy with chocolate rather than using butter cream or fondant - since the former two really don't add any structural integrity - chocolate however, dries hard and is great to work with.



First I coated him with a layer of melted white chocolate - tinted blue, to fill in the cracks and try to even the shape out. After which I painted him once more to get the texture I wanted.


Next some detailing with more tinted white choclate..



I used bittersweet chocolate clay for the button eyes, nose, and mask.
The sai and shuriken are from gumpaste (previous posts) painted black and then heavily dusted with silver shimmery goodness.



Last minute addition:
I used some of the leftover chocolate clay to make a pair of nunchaku. (the rest of the leftover clay will go towards making Annie a small town of stick figures which she has expressed desire in being able to eat each in one bite) Seems the oil-based nature of chocolate won't let me paint them with waterbased food colouring (maybe if i made a paste with powdered sugar?), or the chain would have been silver. oh well!

badum!

Check it out. Today, I made a practice humming bird. I spent the rest of the week making fondant and cakes and such - so today was just an assembly.

I started with the wings, a layer of fondant over the wire frame, and then many many feathers of various sizes to cover the top and bottom.

I recently purchased a Roul'Pat mat, and am loving it. It took a while to find the largest size possible at the cheapest price (some places sell it for 60 bucks!) - this mat combined with the rolling pin I use = no stick fondant! faboo fer sure.
The feathers were cut out again using my trusty leaf-shaped fondant cutters.

I didn't really want to do more than one wing, once I knew I could do it, but I needed to make both so that the wing apparatus would be balanced. This was very important, considering that the weight of the wings ended up being, I'm guessing, a little over two pounds.

Next was rather easy - I had shaved down the shape of the pound cake and the rice crispy head, and then attached the head with a dowel through it and the body.
I'd never lain fondant on a cake without butter cream, but now I totally understand why it's done - it really does give the fondant something to stick to - otherwise it ends up like a sort of lose sack over the cake, which is what happened with the bird's body.


I am hoping in the end for the bird to "fly" by resting atop these three upturned glasses - I balanced this and worried about it staying long enough to take photos - so I really need to figure out some sort of support for the whole cake, as well as the wings, since they are so very weighty. I'm thinking that the tail will be a part of this support, but haven't figured it out yet.

I also have some fabulous ideas for flowers, and know what I'm going to do with the sugar shapes I made earlier this week.

I need a blowtorch.