Mold Making and Airbrushing

Wow, it was been one long colorful week! We learned to cast molds and airbrushing this week. There are several ‘in-a-pinch’ methods we learned, like cocoa powder, cornstarch and gelatin. So we first created the molds of seashells and picture frames and more sea shells and then casted chocolate into those shapes!

I totally love these shapes together. They make me think vintage beach house :) I don’t think I have pictures of the gelatin molds we made. By the way, I have decided gelatin is NASTY. I will never look at Jello the same way again. (That’s for you, ashley louise ;)

We also made silicone molds and we required to wear gloves and safety goggles. So naturally, we looked like crazy mad scientists ;)

Thumbs up from Eva ;)

We made molds of little raspberry looking things…but you can’t really tell here…
 Oh! Whaddyaknow I found a gelatin mold picture, along with the raspberry thing we made a silicone mold of:
We casted chocolate in them once they were dry. Mmmmm

After about a day and a half of that, we started airbrushing! A word of caution to those of you who might want to try this. Do not be surprised if your snot happens to be the color you’ve been working with all week. I used blue…Yep. ‘Nuff said ;)
Anyways, we had to learn how to dissemble and reassemble our guns so that we knew how everything worked. Then we got on to the most exciting part. DOTS. Oh yeah…pages and pages of DOTS.
   

When we were proficient at dots, we were privileged to move onto LINES. ;)

Oops, no pictures of lines. You’re not missing much. We also learned what are called dagger strokes and we got to try our hand at 3-D images. Those were pretty cool.
Yes, I used a stencil :) Once we kind of had the basics down, we learned some sweet special effects!! Like smoke…

And clouds and mountains!
And what’s airbrushing without some mishaps?! I was picking up my airbrush to start working and the paint cap on my gun flew off and I got royal blue paint all over me!!! I’m going to be scrubbing stains this weekend…
Our proficiency this week was airbrushing fondant on a cake. (not a real cake…one made of Styrofoam, affectionately called a ‘dummy cake’) We had to airbrush 2. One had to have a wood grain effect on it, something we learned this week, and the other had to showcase the other skills we’d learned, to include a gradient effect and stencils. It was a lot harder than I thought, airbrushing fondant is WAY different from airbrushing paper! But I think I’m okay with the way mine turned out :)
  And yes, I covered these dummy cakes myself with the fondant. And it is still the bane of my existence.

Not too shabby for one week, eh?  ;)

Random note: the weather has been CRAZY here! Last night we totally lost our electricity because the winds were SO fierce! But it was fun to light candles and make our way through the house with just candlelight and flashlights :)

And thank you for your thoughts and prayers for me and John! He’s still plugging away looking for a job, we hope he finds something soon!

Navy Pier

We interrupt this regularly scheduled pastry program to bring to you – a date. :)

Date night is Saturday now, because I get home late on Fridays and I’m exhausted from our weekly deep cleaning that day. So Saturday we went to Navy Pier to walk around and see the fireworks!! They have fireworks going every Saturday night at 9 at least through October. We took the Metra in and then a bus over to Navy Pier. It was fun, except the bus smelled funny…

We got there and found this HUGE NOODLE! The nice guy that kind of mans the noodle told us there are only four of these noodles in the country, with 2 in Chicago. The others are in Boston and San Francisco.

We walked around the pier outside, and looked at the (FREE) Smith’s Museum of Stained Glass. It was really pretty! They had some really weird artwork too, but we enjoyed seeing all the cool designs.
We also got fried dough…SO YUMMY. We got powdered sugar EVERYWHERE :)

We also walked around inside and looked at shops, we had some extra time before the fireworks started.
We also took a break from walking and sat at the fountain outside Navy Pier’s entrance. There were these funny little girls that would jump and scream every time the fountain shot water up.
  
We went up early to find a place to sit and John took some sweet special effects pictures while we were waiting:

The fireworks were fun! This week it was for some Latin Culture festival, so they had fun music playing. The fireworks lasted about 10 minutes and they were pretty cool!

Now, for the funny story. We had it all planned out: Fireworks at 9, catch the bus at 9:15, it would take about 20 minutes…and we’d run to catch the 9:40 train home. Perfect. Well, we kind of missed the bus stop we had wanted to get off on, so we got off at the next one (it was still pretty close, thank goodness) and we’re SPRINTING to the train station and we’re totally going to make it on time! and…! There’s no 9:40 train. what?!?! Well…it was Saturday…and I’d been reading the weekday schedule. No 9:40 train on Saturdays. Oops. So we hung out in the station food court for an hour because the next train left at 10:40. So sad. We were very sleepy. But we finally got onto the 10:40 train and made it home and crashed. So all in all, a nice night :)

Mom, Look What I Made at School Today!

Hurray! It is the unveiling of the PASTILLAGE SHOWPIECE!

But not yet, first I must show you all my progress ;) I know, I know, you’re so excited!

Lots of pictures!
Okay, remember? This is kind of the look we’re going for (but our bases don’t have the cool cut out on the side…the molds hadn’t come in yet. So sad):

Here is my station, getting all ready to work
I had all my pieces ready, my pressed sugar base, and my sugar ‘glue’ :) I started off by putting on the triangles. However, this was the first crisis. Oh yeah, we had crises. Not too many though, surprisingly. I had my best looking triangles on, and was getting ready to place a stem, when my triangles FELL to the table and SHATTERED! !!! Pastillage is really brittle when it dries, so it totally sounds like glass breaking. There was total silence in the kitchen today except for the crashes of broken pieces…and the occasional swearing at the showpiece. But not from me, I promise :) So after the first mishap with the triangles, I decided to take pictures of as many steps as possible…mainly to prove to you all that I DID IT. :) So, second-best-looking triangles!

So, next came some stems

Crisis number two: I was placing a 3rd stem, when something startled me, I jumped, and consequently knocked off the two placed stems and they FELL and SHATTERED! !!!! But you’ll notice on the board behind the piece that I had lots of extra pieces…that definitely helped me manage my stress…Now for the succession of leaves…amazingly, that was the end of the crises…it was quite a relief…it took a lot of concentration and a steady hand to keep these in place until the glue dried (it only took minutes for it to dry, but you had to support the piece there the whole time – if you didn’t wait long enough, it would FALL and SHATTER! !!!!)

I got the remaining stems and pebbles on,
  
And THEN – the flower. That was almost as stressful as getting started…I REALLY didn’t want to break everything and the flower was a substantial piece…I was worried it would fall! But it went on without a hitch and then I was DONE!
                           
I’m not gonna lie, it took me TWO HOURS to put this bad boy together. And it was a lot harder that my Chef Instructor made it look (but of course, right?) I initially didn’t like the way I had placed my bottom two stems, but the more I looked at it, the more I thought “MAN this is really cool! I can’t believe I’ve actually put this together after only a WEEK of training!” How awesome is that?!

After more of us we’re done, we started getting creative with our photography and used black sheet pans as our background. So, for your viewing pleasure…
And yes, technically, it is all edible, but to be honest, I wouldn’t really eat it if I were you… ;)

And no, I didn’t bring it home. Would you believe it? It went into the trash. It would never have survived the trip home. I kept the flower though…and got interesting looks on the train. That was fun. :) But you better believe I’ll be bringing my first chocolate sculpture home!!!!! (but that’s not for another couple of weeks…)

And that is my first big accomplishment!! Thanks for keeping up with my adventures!!!!!!!!!!!!!!