Shopping Wish List

Since starting a new full time job has opened up a whole new avenue of shopping avenues for me. This is kind ofo both a good and a bad thing.

But it has allowed me to indulge in a whole bunch of new baking gadgets which has been totally awesome. I've really enjoyed progressing my baking skills (or.. lack thereof?)

Some of the new baking products I've picked up recently include

-a heart shaped spring form cake tin (picked up quite cheaply on a brandsexclusive sale along with a few other things...)

-star shaped cookie cutters (from chalet. these are great because I can use them not only with cookies -i've made gingebread with them so far-; but also cake decorating. i used them for a friend's birthday cake on the weekend (fondant stars) and they looked and tasted great)

-proper icing bag with different tips (from chalet. turns out a proper icing bag and the right icing texture makes a huge difference). i've been having lots of fun experimenting with different kinds of buttercreams. i'm keen to try out swiss meringue buttercream, but i'm still a bit too chicken because of the raw egg factor..

-three same sized cake tins from Aldi. i bought these for about $3 each which was a great bargain, but because of the way they are designed, cake gets stuck in the ridges of the tin everytime i use it and was nearly impossible to clean properly, so i ended up tossing them after two uses.. fail! However, it did give me some good experience with layering and stacking cakes. I've tried torting the cake layers before, but i didn't do it right and the icing soaked into the cake, creating an overly sweet, strangely marbled cake. I will hopefully stock up some more of these cake tins, but the proper ones this time.. Which don't appear to be too expensive, fortunately!



A couple of things I'd love to add to my collection sometime soon

-A cake turntable. Buddy from Cake Boss says that these are essential to cake decorating and I can see why. Something like this but I've seen far cheaper models around on the net.

-Proper cake tins so I can do stacked and layered cakes with ease. Some of the best bake blogs I've seen online swear by the cheap ones (as in, non spring form and non loose base).

A bit more fancy tools that i've been drooling over include

-a fondant imprint mat. I love that you can create beautiful designs so easily> And since I'm a bit of a noob when it comes to that sort of thing, imprint mats are quite appealing. $50.90 is a bit overpriced for an imprint mat though, I've seen them going for about $20 on other sites.

-Letter shapes (for cookies and fondant). I'd also like them to use on buttercream so I can trace letters (again, icing noob.. i swear my icing writing always comes out awfully messy..)

-A fondant smoother to smooth up ruffles.



I had the fun of experimenting with fondant for the first time the other day. I had planned on making an NRL themed cake for a friend and was planning on buying the canned fondant stuff (the Orchard brand) for Coles to make that part of the plan a bit easier on myself. Somehow I ended up at a shopping centre with no Coles and only a Woolworths and for some odd reason, Woolies does not stock any kind of fondant or similar. I ended up making a panicky phone call to a friend to ask her to google how to make marshmallow fondant (which I had previously read about as being quite easy to make). Apparently it consisted of only marshmallows and icing sugar - pretty easy right? So I stocked up on marshmallows, sugar and food colouring and went home with, well, the best of intentions.

Ok, so the end result was pretty good. It tasted great, coloured well and gave a fairly smooth finish.

The problem was getting there. I melted the marshmallows, as per The Internet had informed me, stirred in blue dye, added the due amount of icing sugar and mixed. And mixed. And mixed. It was still waaay too sticky. At this point, The Instructions had said, it should be too difficult to mix and should seem somewhat like a sugary dough. My mixture was still goopy.

I added half a cup of icing sugar. Made no difference. Abandoning all hope of being neat, orderly and properly measured about this, I threw the rest of the icing sugar from the whole bag into the bowl. It was hard to mix. That should do it, I thought, pleased. The instructions told me to put the mix onto a flat surface and knead with icing sugar until smooth and no longer sticky, like bread dough. Sadly, since I was doing this at my boyfriend's house and I do not trust any surfaces to be hygenic enough to actually lay food on, I had to do this all on a small, freaking chopping board.

"Ok, I can do this", I thought.

I dusted the 'dough' with extra icing sugar, ditto my hands.

Idiotically, I dove in with both hands. and attempted to knead it.

I came away with two covered in blue goop hands. It was very hard to wash off.

I sighed and added another half a cup of icing sugar. Still not much success. Finally, I broke off small pieces of the marshmallow fondant and kneaded them separately with icing sugar until I finally reached a desired consistency.

By this time, both I, the kitchen stove and all the heating elements, the floor and the bench were all heavily dusted with the dust that is powdered sugar. There was probably some sweat and a vague sense of failure mixed in with that too.

Finally, I got to the stage of rolling out the fondant to cover the cake. First batch stuck hideously to the chopping board (which I had lined with baking paper to try and avoid this, surprise, surprise - it did not work), so I threw out that piece of paper and tried again. This time with a slightly more insane amount of icing sugar on top of the paper. This batch rolled out with slightly more success. Finally! Using a rolling pin (just like they do on TV!) i laid the fondant over the cake. There were a few cracks (unavoidable.. sadly also unfixable) leaking chocolate icing, waay too much fondant on one side of the cake and a bit less on the other, bit ruffly bits and yes, the cake layers were tilting (this is what happens when you don't have even layers and runny icing.)

Disaster? Possibly. Do I need more practice? Absolutely. Do I still love it, despite the constant setbacks? Of course! Bring it on, baby! Here's to not being so disasterfull in the future :)