Monday, October 5, 2009

Make Your Own Gum Paste

Almost all of my cupcake decorations are made from gum paste. I use fondant decorations sparingly because fondant takes much longer to dry and when you put fondant on buttercream, the moisture from the buttercream can cause the fondant to melt - not pretty! I have ended up with a few decorating train wrecks where I opened my cupcake carrier to find a colored blob sitting on top of the cupcake where a cute decoration was supposed to be.

I have been using Wilton's gum paste mix and you just add water. This gum paste gives you great results and I love it, but it gets expensive if you use it a lot. So...this week I am experimenting with making my own gum paste.

Edna De la Cruz of Design Me a Cake is my favorite cake decorating instructor and she has a lot of videos on You Tube. Her video on making gum paste is just over 9 minutes long, but if you have time to watch it, she walks you through the process of making your own gum paste step-by-step.



2 comments:

kokoro said...

very interesting. But I didn't understood what tylose is. I've never heard before. Is it gum? What about if you don't use it?

Lundy said...

From my research, Tylose is what makes gum paste get hard. It resists humidity and makes the gum paste really white. If you don't use it, I think you will end up with a consistency like royal icing. The other product you can use is gum tragacanth, but I understand that is much more expensive. I bought my Tylose at Michael's.

You can also knead Tylose powder into regular fondant to make gum paste out of the prepared fondant.