The chocolate animation cell is all very well, but working with warm chocolate is a pain, so I thought I'd give it all a go with Royal Icing.
The chocolate animation cell is all very well, but working with warm chocolate is a pain, so I thought I'd give it all a go with Royal Icing.
Here's the mark I finished butterfly panel. The marbelling in the background seemed like a good idea at the time, but now that I look at it I'm not so happy. In fact, in general I'm not very happy with the colours so I'll probably have another run at this one.
Here's the instructions though:
1. First you need to find a picture. Something with large panels/details (perhaps from a childrens colouring in book, or patchwork, or stencils, or stained glass - I've gone and lost the link for this, but I think it came from a stained glass kit. Print it out the size you want your final panel to be - I darkened the image a bit to make sure I could see all the details I wanted:
2. Next I've iced all the outlining edges (all the black bits in my picture). Since black food colouring is never really black enough, I've just gone with plain white for my first try at this technique. I found that these zipper bags were perfect as a base for this - both transparent and heavy duty enough not to wrinkle:
3. Now that I've done that I wait for it to set/dry - 24 hours is best - more if you're in a humid environment. Finally it's time to start flooding in the colours:
You can see from the zoom that I experimented with a couple of ways of flooding - classically by gently spooning and prodding with a cocktail stick, and directly piping it into areas - the piping is good for the small areas - like the spots on the wings, but classic flooding looks much better in the larger areas.
As you can see - I directly piped the spots, without an outline - I think that is a technique I want to try in something else later on.
4. Finally I fill in the background (along with the marbling I'm not happy with) I did the marbling by first flooding white, then taking a dab of blue on the tip of a cocktail stick and swooshing it around.
It was interesting from the back - I love how glossy it was. One problem is that the colour leeched through from the flooding to the outline - one of the downsides of using white outlines.
Looking at this, I was reminded of these 3d cards (similar to these - I seem to remember that I made a droopy dog with sad eyes...) that my nan and I made when I was a kid. So I piped out some parts to see what it would look like:
I picked some of the items in the printout to pipe and fill as parts for my Icing 3d Decoupage
Then propped them onto the icing panel to see how it looked:
I did it on the back since I was so disenchanted with the front side marbling. It's not perfect, but I can certainly see where this could go, perhaps with better colours, and with a more suitable picture.
Lessons learned:
- White outlines need careful handling. The colours bleed, they don't stand out particularly well. I think it would take a particular type of picture to use white outlines.
- Colours aren't strong enough. I use paste colours so they're very strong without diluting the flooding too much, but I'd imagined this to look more like stained glass than it does. Again, with the right picture this wouldn't be a problem.
Tasted good though :P
Check out the mark II panel here - much stronger colours, much more what I'd imagined when I first planned the idea
http://cakeable.com/inspiration/butterfly-royal-icing-panel-mark-ii
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