Fun New Toys Courtesy of eBay!

After I took my last Wilton class, I was in a bit of a cake decorating fervor. I wanted all of the shiny new toys that make cake decorating easier and more fun: the gumpaste shoe molds, the cake ball roller, the hundreds of petal dusts, flower cutters, and veiners required to make uber-life-like sugar flowers. (I realize that gumpaste flowers is probably the most preferred term that I've heard, but I like the sound of sugar flowers better: it sounds prettier, more elegant...tastier.)

Turns out, I'm an underemployeed recent college grad who just bought a new car and is literally living in her parents' basement, so  I can't actually afford any of that.

But what can I afford? eBay! I found tons of discounted supplies there, and bought myself lots of pretty new toys to play with. I'm most excited (for the moment) about the hydrangea cutters, because I can't get my Wilton hydrangeas to look pretty! :( I guess I'm not impressing them correctly, but they just look flat and un-life-like. (Not literally flat, since I hung them upside down to try and they are curved nicely...but they just don't have a lot of dimension to them otherwise.) I've yet to dust them, so maybe that will help.

Back to the new cutters! They are plunger cutters, which means they impress a pattern (in this case, the veins in the petals) on the gumpaste after they've been cut out. Excellent! It saves me a whole step in the process. Back when I was making Ben and Crystal's wedding cake, I used the rose leave cutters and they turned out fabulously.

The other cutters I bought were ivy leaves, snowflakes, and butterflies. I was just trying to go for a variety of cutters that I think I'll use frequently, or that I've needed in the past.



The funny part of this story is that my parents didn't know that I had ordered all these cutters on the internet, so when the packages started rolling in, my mom was a little concerned about why a package with "mold" in it had arrived on our front door. Oh, Mom, not that kind of mold! :)