![]() I did watch some videos on YouTube of people using water with success, but I wanted to take as many precautions as possible, and I liked the idea of making a "drunken" armadillo! (Alcohol is also more volatile and will evaporate and dry faster than water.) I painted the armadillo with light sweeps of the brush across the cobblestone texture so that the little nooks and crannies would stay black and give my little guy more depth and texture and left him to dry over night.While planning our little Halloween shindig, one of my first food ideas was to make a spider-shaped cake. Using vodka was a way to get around melting the fondant with water. ![]() It was a good thing I had bought a yellowish gold pearl dust as a back up plan! I mixed the dust with enough vodka to give it a watercolor consistency with the color I liked (less liquid makes the color more intense). I chose a silver spray to paint the fondant with which worked really well until I ran out 2/3 of the way through. I used a fondant cobblestone impression tile to give the skin some texture before placing it on the cake and painting it. Before putting the fondant on the cake, I iced it with chocolate buttercream icing to hold the fondant on. tubs that I purchased from Michael's to make a covering for the head and body made from cake, and constructed the ears, feet and tail entirely out of fondant. I used the "Duff" (as in The Ace of Cakes) black buttercream flavored fondant. Once all the layers were covered with fondant, skewers also held the head in place. I filled the layers with chocolate butter cream and secured the top layer with barbeque skewers since that's all I had. ![]() Then I used the parts I cut off to construct a head. To make the armadillo's head and body, I cut one end of the football-shaped layers off at a spot that I thought looked like they could be shoulders. It turned out that fondant is pretty simple to work with if you take your time and relax. But even so, I figured it couldn't be any worse than the result if I were to try and make buttercream look like armadillo skin, and I did make someone a promise. The pros on TV all make it look so easy, but every time I watched one of them do it, I was sure that it was just a disaster waiting to happen in the hands of someone less experienced. My previous experience had been in making little decorations to top cupcakes, so I was anxious about how easy or difficult it would be to work with in covering a cake. ![]() This was my first time working with fondant on a large scale. ![]() This was a mistake! An hour later, I ended up with a football-like cake that was the crispiness of a cookie on the sides and bottom, but completely runny in the middle. I placed in the oven that was pre-heated to 350˚ F (per recipe instructions) and set the timer for twice as long as what the recipe called for, thinking this would be appropriate for the doubled amount of batter in one pan. I placed by first batch of cake batter which happened to be meant for two 8-inch rounds, in the pan and it filled the pan perfectly. This seemed to work perfectly (once I got the cake to do what it was supposed to do.). I learned a really cool trick online for substituting the cake flour the recipe called for with all-purpose flour too! You simply replace one tablespoon of each cup of all-purpose flour with cornstarch. I chose Paula Deen's red velvet cake recipe that I found on the Food Network site ( Grandmother Paula's Red Velvet Cake). When my pan came in the mail, I admired it, then put it in the cupboard without a second thought until it was time to bake the cake. Most people who posted or blogged about their armadillo cake said they used a Wilton football-shaped pan, so I bought one right away. ![]()
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