Fondant Tortoise Tutorial

It's been really long since I posted a tutorial here, so here goes. This is a tutorial for a super cute tortoise or tortie as I call him. I made this ages ago and clicked pictures to share with you'll but it got buried under a huge pile of pics. Found them today and like I keep saying, it's better late than never right? :) I am no fondant expert, I rarely use it, but I like experimenting here and there. Tortie was one of my experiments and I loved him so much I wanted to share the joy of making him with you'll. Hopefully, you'll will make him with ease and love him too.

This is a very basic and simple tortoise as you can see, it barely requires any instructions. I have skipped a few steps which I thought were very simple and I hope instructions suffice there.

One, Two, Three, make a tortie for me

Tortie tutorial:

• Step 1 - Colour your fondant in the shade you want the tortoise shell to be. I used a light shade of blue. Knead till the colour is fully incorporated, roll out and cut a circle. Keep the rest in a zip lock bag for later use. Colour another batch of fondant green for the tortoise limbs. Also leave a tiny amount uncoloured and another tinier amount coloured black. Store them in a zip lock bag as well. I used a cookie cutter to cut the circle. Choose a circle cutter according to the size you want the tortoise topper to be. Use a quilting tool to imprint lines on the tortoise shell. If you don't have the quilting tool, use a toothpick and dot your design for the tortoise shell on the fondant. I have used a toothpick many times and apart from being time consuming, it's no different when it comes to the outcome of the design. Take a piping tip and use the round end to cut off a semi circle off one side of the tortoise back. You can also use a small circle cutter for the same.
•  Step 2 - Place the cut, imprinted fondant circle on your palm and mould it to form a bit of a dome. After that, on top of anything that has a dome so that it dries out in a mound shape. You need to leave it out for a day to dry out and hold its shape. You get fancy tools for this, like spherical foam balls. If you have one, go ahead and make your life easier. I would suggest an orange if you have one handy. It's a cheaper alternative. I didn't have one around, so I substituted as you can see.
• Step 3 - Use the remaining green coloured fondant to shape 5 balls, one for the head and four smaller ones for the arms and legs. Indent the limbs with the back end of a toothpick to resemble claws or if you are lazy like me,  just basic dots will do. Place them on your work surface and attach the dried shell on top of them, using a dab of water or edible glue. Adjust the placement of the limbs accordingly. Now, take a minuscule amount of white fondant, roll it into two tiny balls for the eyes, attach with a smear of water. Take two tiny dots of black fondant and paste on top of the white balls to make eye balls. You can also use an edible black marker to dot the eye balls, it works out much easier than having to colour such a tiny amount of fondant black for the eye balls. Use a toothpick to form the smile and there you have it, a cute lil fondant tortoise topper.

P.S - Knead a bit of tylose powder into your fondant if you need, it helps the fondant hold it's shape better and dry up into that curved shell shape that you need.

Now go ahead and Get, Set, Bake.. A cute cake maybe to use this adorable topper on....

Simple cupcake decoration

All you need is love

I love cupcakes, both baking/decorating and eating them. They offer you so much in terms of creativity and don't make you feel as guilty as eating huge slices of cake. Whats more, each cupcake can be decorated in a different way, with different flavours, making it so much more than a whole chunk of cake. Not to say that I don't love cake, but cupcakes sit just a teensy bit higher on my lust list than cake :p
Today, I'm gonna show you how you can tszuj up a cupcake in 3 easy steps:

1. Bake your cupcakes in your favourite flavours. 
2. Pipe butter cream icing/frosting on the top ( you can find the recipe for butter cream frosting here
3. Cut out hearts out of red fondant and place them on top. You could also make teeny roses from fondant and use them as 3-D toppers. Viola, you red heart cupcakes are ready.   

Go on, Get Set Bake them :) 

Edible Ladybirds

Smile for the ladybird please

An old pal was shifting to Bangalore and 2012 was upon us with the blink of an eye, so I didn't need any more reasons to make something special. I had bookmarked this for a long time and finally decided to make them and it was well worth the wait. These cuties will make any heart melt and many wouldn't wanna eat them, just keep them around and stare at them (fly did this, I kid you not :p)
So, without further ado, here are my fondant ladybird cupcakes. You can use any ol' cupcake for this decoration and I must thank Diary of a Ladybird for a detailed description of how to make them. Do check it out if you plan on making them. I added my own two bits to them, so can you, but her pic by pic descriptions leave no room for errors. I hope you enjoy making them and eating them as much as I did. On that note, a Biig welcome to Candy, my 'lumper' :D and a Haappy New Year to all my readers (I'm 12 days late, but better late than never right :p) 

The one in the centre was my whimsical geometric art cuz I had some fondant remaining 

The Polka Dot Princess cakes

I've always been fascinated with fondant. A white blanket that swaddles cakes of all sizes, making everything look as pretty as a snow covered garden. However, fondant isn't available off the shelves here and the lazy me always thought it was too much effort to make it from scratch. After watching a week's worth of Fabulous Cakes on TLC, I took the bull by its horns and decided it was time to attack the beast. 


The lazy bug in me, decided to go in for the easier to make marshmallow fondant vs the more authentic but long process of making fondant using glucose, gelatin, corn syrup and what not. All I needed for this recipe was marshmallows and icing sugar. If you  live in India, you know that marshmallows, aren't available off the shelf, so after hunting away at Spencers, Spar and other haunts, eureka, it hit me, Sweet World at popular malls here sells marshmallows. So off I went to their store, the only grown up 'kid' nevertheless, asking the bewildered attendant for only white marshmallows from the pink and white lot. He must have surely thought I'd lost it. After all, for a person eating marshmallows, it hardly matters what colour it is, does it? Regardless, I stood there while he picked and chose the white ones and a happy puppy I was, anticipating the pretty fondant patterns in my head.

Armed with my bag of marshmallows, I set to experiment and much to the amusement of my two cats, I did a happy dance in the kitchen when I finally achieved success. So here's the recipe for fondant and the mini princess cakes..


Polka Dot Princess Cakes 
For the fondant, you will need:
100 grams white marshmallows
1 tablespoon water
3 cups Icing sugar (confectioners sugar)
A few drops of glycerin


Method:
Place the Marshmallows in a large microwavable bowl, ensuring that there's enough space for the marshmallows to rise when they heat up. They often double up in volume when heating up. Add the water and heat them in your microwave for a minute. Take them out, even though they look puffed but not melted, they are. Use a silicone spatula and mix them so that all the water is incorporated. Give it a good whisk till all the bits and pieces are melted well. Add in a cup of icing sugar and begin to mix. The marshmallow mixture will slowly adhere to the icing sugar and it will soon thicken, starting to get harder to mix. After most of it has been incorporated, dust your work surface with icing sugar, put the mixture on it and adding the rest of the icing sugar gradually, begin to knead everything together. The mixture will be extremely sticky at this stage, but it will get better as you knead it in with the rest of the icing sugar. As a rule of thumb, do not add all the icing sugar, making sure to gradually add in only how much is necessary. You might need more or lesser than what the recipe calls for based on the humidity levels in your location. If your dough is too wet, add more icing sugar and if its too dry, add a few drops of water at a time and knead it again. It also helps to knead in a couple of drops of glycerin just to aid the softness of the dough. When the dough isn't sticky anymore, roll it into a ball, cover with cling film twice and store on your counter top if using it within a day or two (depending on how cool the weather is) or store it in your fridge, getting the dough to room temperature before kneading and rolling it. 


For the cakes, head to my senior from college, Aparna's website for this super easy egg-less microwave cake - Apycooking.
I used 3 small bowls instead of one big bowl and substituted the vanilla essence for peppermint essence, my fav. 


For the Buttercream frosting you will need: 
150 grams unsalted butter (softened)
1 cup icing sugar
2 plus 1 tablespoons milk
1 teaspoon vanilla essence


Method:
Whisk the butter, icing sugar, essence and 1 teaspoon milk till it is smooth. Keep aside 3 to 4 spoonfuls of the frosting in another bowl, add the rest of the milk to this mixture to make a thinner frosting, you will need this for the crumb coating of the cake. Once the mini cakes have cooled completely, slice them into halves and fill them with the thick buttercream icing and sandwiching them back together.

Buttercream-filled cake

After this, you need to use the thinner frosting to crumb coat the entire cakes. This is basically a very thin layer that seals in all the stray crumbs so that the cake is smooth when the fondant or the top layer of buttercream is spread on the cake. Using a flat butter knife, cover the cake with a thin layer. Don't worry if the cake is seen through this layer.

Crumb-coated cake

Pop the crumb-coated cakes into the fridge and let it chill till the frosting is hard and dry. While this happens, knead your fondant till its soft and pliable. If you are using different colours, divide the fondant into smaller balls, place them on your work surface that has cling film on it, add in the colour and knead individually till the colours are incorporated completely. Make sure to have gloves on, otherwise you'll end up having a rainbow fondant mixture. Roll out the white fondant (I used the good old desi chapati belan :p ) till it is about half an inch thick and double the diameter of the cake you want to roll it onto. I measure the length and breadth of the cake and that is the size I want my fondant to be rolled into. Keep dusting the roller and work surface with icing sugar as the dough tends to stick while rolling. Once done, place it over the cake and quickly smooth it out and shape the edges, pressing in as you move downwards. Smooth in the base with the back of a spoon and cut off the excess portions with a pizza cutter. This is how it will look after being covered in white fondant. 

Snow white wrapped in fondant

It looks pretty as it is, but if you want to decorate it further, roll out your coloured strips of fondant and cut our shapes and patterns you desire. Simply wet the portions you want to decorate the cake with and attach the coloured shapes. I used simple polka dots for two of my cakes and they do make a pretty sight. For the third, I cut coloured strips and alternated them on the cake.

 As you can see, the base isn't the neatest at times, so decorating them is necessary. You can decorate them with small balls of different colours if you like. A word of caution, this is tedious if you are doing this alone. Luckily, I had hubby walk in from work at this opportune moment and I dragged him into the kitchen to help me with them :p. Don't worry if they are all not even in size, they are too small to be judged by a perfectionist's eyes :)

Or you can roll out strips of different colours, place them in a row and then twirl them together to get this twisted fondant pattern and attach them to the base with a little water:

There you have it, a perfectly decorated set of mini cakes to make any day special. Two people can easily polish off these mini cakes, but if you do want to store them, do so in an airtight container. But be warned, these babies won't last long, especially if you have kids at home or a sweet tooth like me :)