Se7en + 1 Create SugarCraft Characters…

I confess I am just not the most elaborate birthday cake maker ever… in fact I am well known amongst my kids that, while I know that the cake is the very most important part of any birthday celebration… I am quite happy to toss a block of ice-cream onto a tray, cover in sprinkles and light a couple of candles… Trust me – all kids eat ice-cream, and I cannot say the same for cake. Recently Pan Macmillan South Africa gave us a sugar craft book for review purposes:

Our kids were in raptures and dreaming of cakes that had never before been dreamt of. To say that I was a little nervous would be quite an understatement… considering my food art skills. But this is a step-by-step book and we were more than willing to give it a try. Now we have never played with Fondant before and we needed to track it down. Yuppie Chef came to the rescue, and gave us all this fab fondant to try out.

Am I the last person on earth to discover fondant, it is exactly: “play-dough for cakes” and did you know that there are edible pens out there… Seriously, where have I been… clearly this is a family activity of note, especially on a particularly rainy day…

We started with the basics: Mixing colours,

Creating and stacking shapes,

Making faces:

And the pens… did I mention the pens…

They saved the day, when things got just too tricky for fingers!!!

And we tried the step by step projects:

The step by step projects in this book are really detailed and you actually cannot go wrong. There is obviously a whole world out there of teeny tiny tools and the smallest cookie cutters ever and the sweetest crafting tools. And I loved the pages of carefully photographed equipment – there is no doubt about what you need it is all well photographed and the guess work has been removed. That being said, with the step by step projects, it was really easy to improvise and do the projects without all the “necessary” tools. I loved the little tips scattered throughout and I loved that in each project there were new techniques to try that would carry over to your own projects. The choice of projects was vast… really this is the good to book on how to make safari animals, fairies, monsters and aliens, tropical creatures and farm animals. We never got around to making fairies – I think I am keeping that section aside for its own entire project on another rainy day!!!

In other news… Fondant is extremely fun to play with and will provide hours and hours of fun.

It is like play dough and very easy to work with and does not make a mess everywhere… no little tiny bits of fondant everywhere, it tends to stay together. Also, a little goes a very long way… we made all the creations in this post from five packs of fondant and we have leftovers… tons of black… I am thinking “edible chess set!!!”

Fondant Fun… I am thinking this would make a great gift for a family… I know it kept our entire family busy for hours through an entire afternoon of rain… And, since you have made the cake decorations, you have to have a quick cake and that kind of ends an afternoon of craftiness off very well thank you!!!

I have to say, I think the author, Suzi Witt, has done an incredible work with this book – providing heaps of information for beginners like us, and masses of inspiration for more experienced crafters…

We really want to thank our friends at Yuppie Chef for providing us with all the Fab Nicoletta Fondant and pens that we needed to create this post. We really enjoyed it!!!

And we would also like to thank Pan Macmillan South Africa for providing us with this book to review.

We were not paid to write this post, and the opinions we expressed are as usual entirely our own.