Cake-A-Month - January - Post 6

I've been spending a lot of time over the past few days making the gumpaste flowers for the cake and I've ran into so many problems. I have a big problem with trying out new things: I always want to be perfect, and when my first attempts are less than perfect I get frustrated, dispirited and often, give up. So when I started having problems with the flowers I was nearly ready to kick the bucket with the entire cake a month challenge and give up. But of course I didn't cos I knew I was acting worse than my 3 year old and had to get over myself :)

So a couple of posts back you would have seen my first attempt at gumpaste flowers, which I was quite happy with. I wasn't entirely happy with the structure of the flower though, so I decided to try out a different technique the next time around.

What I tried to do was start in at the middle of the flower (rather than starting with the bottom layer like I did for my first flower) and started by wrapping the inside petals around a toothpick, and gradually building on it with layers of petals. Sounds great huh? Well it didn't quite work out that way. The petals started sticking to everything BUT the other petals, they were drooping and falling off and I couldn't get them to look natural when I finally did get them to stick. I think I ended up throwing a tantrum my toddler would be envious of and threw the whole thing in the bin. Yeah, I'm THAT person :/

So I gave up with it for that day and sat on the computer looking at heaps of different tutorials. I  began to realize that gumpaste flowers are a whole different ballpark unto themselves. There was no way in hell I was going to sit down and come up with flawless, beautiful flowers until I'd been practicing for a loooong time. I picked up a few little tidbits of info that have really helped me though:
1. The sugar glue isn't going to instantly 'glue' the pieces together. It's going to take time and I need to apply each petal individually and wait till that one is stable before moving onto the next. (Well the way I was building them it needed to be done that way anyway!)
2. Brushing the petals with the food coloring like I had been planning on doing just wasn't going to work that way. The lemon juice was making them dry super shiny and I'm not exactly an artist so I wasn't doing the worlds best painting job! A better technique would have been to color the gumpaste yellow, then use luster powder to add dimension and make the color appear more natural.
3. Trying to make the flowers by working on each petal and putting them together probably wasn't the best method to pick for my first attempt. I would have been better off starting with actual flower cutters, or large circles to make ruffled layer flowers.
4. Having the proper size/shape moulds for my flowers to dry in would have been a huge help.

So tonight I sat down and started playing around with the gumpaste again, using some of the techniques I'd learnt online. I decided not to pursue the elaborate flowers I was attempting before, while I had managed to produce one nice one the rest were just out of my skill and only succeeded in frustrating me.

Here are the flowers I ended up with:

Much simpler than the other ones I was doing, but probably more suited to a beginner like me :) And on the plus side, they're far less frustrating than the other ones LOL!

Anyway, just as I was starting to get the hang of it (and finally working out how to roll the gumpaste thin!), the stupid gumpaste tool I've been using to ruffle the edges broke!! :(
Luckily my very handy DH whipped out the superglue and fixed it up for me, but now I need to wait overnight for it to dry :(

While waiting I thought I'd try out my new letter press from Clikstix.

I was really looking forward to using this and being able to finish off the January cake with a happy birthday message to my hubby BUT I couldn't get the stupid things to work properly. I have no idea how people use these stupid things, you're supposed to brush your gumpaste with icing sugar to stop it from sticking, then simply press down on the gumpaste with the clikstix cutter, press down on the edges, lift it up and press down the ejector bit to eject the letter.

NOPE. It does NOT work like that. This is how it works:
1. Press the clikstix cutter down on the gumpaste and press the edges down.
2. Lift up the clikstix cutter and all of the gumpaste along with it.
3. Try to peel the excess gumpaste off without much luck.
4. Push down on the ejector to eject the letter. Watch in frustration as nothing ejects.
5. Get out a toothpick to dig the gumpaste out from the letter section.
6. Soak in water overnight to get rid of the gumpaste.

Anyone know how to use these stupid things???? If so, PLEASE TELL ME!!! Otherwise I'm giving up and buying the cookie cutter style ones on eBay!