Sugar High

In an attempt to take my mind off of other issues, I decided to play with my cake stuff this weekend.

I haven't made my cake for class this week yet, I will probably do that on Monday.

What I did was make a batch of royal icing, and practice drop leaf flowers. Royal icing is the stuff made out of sugar and egg whites, and it dries really hard. Know the letters or flowers that you can buy at the grocery store to put on a cake? They are usually pixelated? Those things are royal icing. Super sweet, and very crunchy.

Drop flowers are made with a star tip. While squeezing, the tip is rotated about 45-90 degrees, making the stars swirl into little flowers. I tried this in class last week, and couldn't do it to save my life. My teacher said that I needed to stop squeezing. I thought I had, but apparently the stress is such that I am just squeezin' the hell out of my pastry bag, completely unaware.

Fast forward to Saturday night. I tried to color one part of the icing blue, and one violet. Unfortunately, the blue looked gray, and the violet came out screaming purple. Oh well. Next time I need flowers for a mortician or a drag queen, I am set!

Here is a picture of a few of my first, sad attempts. The one in the middle is "pre-swirl" for whatever reason. Note the horrid blue-gray color:




After a while, I got the hang of it, and created at least 75 reasonable facsimiles of a flower.

In case you want a closer look, here is a representative flower.

After I got all of the mess cleaned up, I proceeded to make another mess tonight.

Instead of icing, I decided to try my hand at meringue "cookies". I put the quotes, because they aren't really a cookie, per se, but they are small and sweet and baked. Basically, it is just meringue that is baked in a very slow oven for a very long time. Since today was so cold, it seemed like a good thing to do.

I am taking a dozen of them to work (I went through them like Grant took Richmond this evening watching the Padres game. I finally had to take them downstairs and put them in the car, how sad is that?). Come on over to my desk and see if there are any left. Who said there would be no reward for wading through this drivel?