Basically, I picked up my pastillage hand (no, not my real hand), and the index finger fell right off. Just snap. OOPS. Not off to such a great start…..but okay, I figured I could take some of the royal icing later on after I finished sanding the millions of pieces (around 30) and “glue” it back. At that moment, chef walked by and noticed my struggle unfortunately. And said my hand was not dainty enough to use. So I had to dispose of it :( Which left me without a centerpiece for my project :(( So I had a flat rectangle for my base, three hearts, and about 20 petals for flowers to compose my project out of. Boo. So, alas, I did not have much choice other than flowers at that point which left my quite despondent to the amusement of my bench partners I’m sure.
From there, I sanded for the first half hour or so to get smooth pastillage pieces. Then grabbed the royal icing (in a bag for piping), and set out on the construction of my flowers. That went ok, so I moved on to painting. We used gel food colorings mixed with vodka (because water would dissolve the sugarwork, but vodka will evaporate quickly). Painting went relatively well. I had some minor mishaps which involved cracking my pieces three times in different places, but was able to make it work out in my favor. Thankyou God.
All in all, I have never heard every student in my class cuss as much as we all did in class tonight as we took turns with our art pieces breaking, and needing to start over and over and over again. But we did it :)
Oh, and I don’t plan on using pastillage again for a very long time because it tastes gross, is ridiculously frustrating to work with, and no one really wants to eat it!!
