Now that the event is over and the surprise is sprung we can talk about it!
Note this is a public post so that people can find the link to the shoe pics.
Last Saturday
Thursday we used some of the left over gumpaste to create decorations and glued them on with a slurry made of gumpaste and water. It was at this point that I broke the heel off of the first shoe I picked up. Funny that, when I coiled a snake of gumpaste around the heel I must have put too much pressure on it. This would be an irritation for the entire project because no matter what I tried it never stayed in place. I should have just hit it with some super glue but that would have made it inedible. We let these sit under the bowl overnight and then painted them on Friday.
In order to paint them we went through the gel cake food coloring that I had collected and once again observed that I tend to buy a lot of blue and red - but not much else. Most of the stuff I have is old enough that we need to get rid of it and buy new. However we won't be buying blue for quite a while. So in the end we had several shades of blue, three of red, a mauve, brown, violet, burgundy, yellow, orangey-gold and black. We also used some standard green food coloring because I didn't find the cake gel stuff until after LLT had already done her green shoe. I did mine with the cake gel stuff though. This does explain some of the color choices for the shoes though since we were rather limited to what we had. We also hit the shoes with bits of luster dust in places but that was limited because the colors never really stopped being sticky.
While we were painting we were also baking the cake. LLT wanted to make her favorite cake, the white chocolate whisper cake (from the Cake Bible) that we made for
In the morning, while LLT was making breakfast she opened up the egg whites since I was getting ready to make the frosting. She said "did you open this already?" and I said "no". I had not noticed it when I bought the container that the inner seal had been pushed in. So we headed back to the Safeway to return the package. LLT went with me and she went to get our morning Starbucks while I headed to the back of the store to get the new egg whites. Problem though, I had originally bought a large container of whites and there weren't any left. So I grabbed one of the small containers and thought "hey I should double check the inner seal". It was busted. Next container? Busted. I checked 3 containers and they were all busted - so I ended up grabbing them and a container of 18 eggs to see if they would let me exchange for the eggs instead. The clerk said that since the eggs were buy one get one free we could get the other set as well. So LLT ended up going back to get those so she could see the cool thing I found on the way back to the eggs - some metallic plates in gold and red. I'd thought we could get them (they were buy one get one free as well) to present the high table cakes on. I was still trying to decide what I wanted from Starbucks so we traded places. When she came back with the eggs she had found them in silver as well so now we have red, silver and gold. They worked well for the cakes and I can see them being useful in the future.
One of the problems we had was that even after sitting overnight the shoes were still tacky. We got the bright idea of putting them in the oven at a low temp.
While we finished icing the cakes
This actually worked out pretty well since the organizers of the event decided to have a boasting contest. We arranged to be part of the contest. During dinner I said to LLT "so have you figured out what you're going to say?" which led to us working out a script. As LLT had walked into the hall someone had stopped her to talk about the rapier that was presented at the Ponte Alto Investiture a few years ago. LLT said she was going to turn that into the boast. I said I only had one problem with that - I was the one who made that rapier - LLT was busy cooking the rest of the feast that day. So we came up with the plan that LLT would tell the story using "I" and I would slap her and she'd say "ummm...WE". The problem of this of course was that the first slap was a bit harder than I'd intended (it echoed in the hall) and so instead LLT acted afraid and made sure to say "we".
So the boast was that we can make anything in sugar and we could prove it. We headed out to the car and grabbed the cakes (helped by several people). We came in and presented the cakes first to
The shoes got all of the reaction we had hoped for.
People liked the cake as well and I was happy to see that more than half of the populace cake got eaten. A couple of people took the rest home. Since the high table pieces were too large for any one person to eat the extras of those got taken home as well. All in all it was a success.