White Chocolate Truffles

This is the second time I've made these and they turned out much better.  I'm not very good with chocolate but the ganache was fantastic.  I made rose and orange flavored chocolates; some coated in white chocolate, and some coated in a coco powder (which is my favorite!).  When the bitter coco melts with the sweet white chocolate, it's sooo amazing.


It takes a few stages but it is well worth it.

(more later)

Fondant & Gum Paste

I've been really wanting to try doing more fondant cakes and gumpaste decorations.  This one was only an experiment which is why it looks a little rough.  I wanted to try out decorations so I used half the batter for the cupcakes, and half the batter for the cake.  It's a gold cake with a strawberry jam center.  I did a crumb coating then lay the fondant on top.  The cake is so soft that I think the fondant weighed it down a little too much, which is why it's better to have two layers I'd imagine.

The cupcakes on the right are the gold cake with a chocolate ganache topping and fondant decorations. The buttercream frosting next to it wasn't the best recipe (I have since tried others) but it's a vanilla buttercream frosting.  The consistency was very strange, but I've found a whole bunch of different frosting recipes that are much better suited for what I was trying to do.  Boiled icing is very much interesting.  It has a really great texture, and it's completely fat free.  It's more like marshmallow texture, so some might not like that, but it's got a really nice look when you ice the cake because of the structure of the mixture.  It holds up very well.


Gumpaste is pretty interesting to work with.  I bought gumpaste powder to mix together with fresh ingredients to make the gumpaste that I used.  It was really fun and definitely a learning experience.  I tried for carnations.  They were pretty though a little 'wilted' looking.  Another thing that might have affected all of the decorations was the humidity.  It's been terrible lately with all of this rain so that might have been why all of the decorations were a little iffy.  I will be practicing more, since practicing is definitely what it takes.  And I'll hopefully be able to post more on it.


**To all of the creative types who have always wanted to try these things**

  If you want to try gumpaste and fondant but you're scared of what might happen, do it anyway!  I always believe that people should do something and figure out how to fix things on their own, just trying different things until you find a solution.  Not everyone can be trained on these things or just know how to do it.  So if you want to, you should go ahead and do it, if it turns out bad, gumpaste is just a little sugar, you can always make more.  You dont always have to buy the powders in the store, you can make it from scratch, but I hear it's a little difficult that way.  But the powder you buy makes quite a few flowers so you have leeway if you do buy that.

Good luck!  ....  I'll need some myself :)