And so it begins.....

So I have been baking treats for a couple of years now. Mostly just for my small little family or holidays and parties I hosted. I have always gotten rave reviews and have been told to sell my goodies (no pun intended LOL) Fast forward to Christmas of this year, I got in my head that I was going to make these snowmen truffles. I buy all my ingredients and off I go!

Took some trial and error, burned the first batch of chocolate in the microwave…. I get the truffles made and coated in chocolate, now what? I can’t have naked snowmen. FONDANT is the answer! How I came to that I am still not sure. I had NEVER made it, worked with it or quiet frankly knew anything about it. That didn’t stop me tho, a little time on Google and with my kitchen aid and my first batch of fondant is made. I couldn’t be PROUDER of myself!

So now I have these snowmen pieces and this fondant. My chocolate on the truffles is imperfect and all the fondant is white. No snowman I know of has ridges or or a white top hat. Smoothing truffle balls and coloring fondant, what’s a girl to do?

It was again trial and error with coloring the fondant, I first tried food coloring. That was an epic fail. It added extra liquid which made the fondant moist and sticky. Although I knew nothing about fondant, I knew that wasn’t right! A trip to the local craft store and I had new coloring gels and much more dynamic fondant. I had black for hats and buttons, orange for noses and red for scarves.

Time to dig in!!

I use the fondant like it is playdoh. Thinking about it and shaping it just the same if I had been playing playdoh my kids. Before I knew it I had wax papers full of all the pieces I needed and set them aside to dry.

I did the best I could with a steak knife to smooth out the edges and round the truffle balls. They stacked fairly well which is what I wanted. Snowmen aren’t symmetrical and I didn’t want mine to be either. They still weren’t perfect but I was Ok with that.

This was a first attempt and I was PROUD!

Finally I googled edible glue and basically found that I could just use confectionery sugar and water to make a paste that hardens quickly and strong. Piece by piece my snowmen were assembled. Now I have these awesome snowmen and don’t know what to do with them. I bought cute packages and off 3 of them went with my children to school for teacher gifts. A friend of my husband had eaten one of the ‘snowmen heads’ so I assembled the bottom and put the ‘facial accessories’ on a piece of foiled cardboard and gave him a headless snowman. The last one was my favorite. My grandmother always gave her co-workers ‘snowman poop’ (google it, you know you want too!). I made her a snowman walking through the woods ‘pooping’ I used leftover gingerbread trees with dyed frosting and fondant decorations. It was a hit!!!

So there you have it. The ‘project’ that got this all started. To date everything I have done has been self taught. I have found you tube and google to be my friends. I get so excited to try new things and even more excited when I see a finished product!

Thanks for hanging out with me this long. My intent is to blog my way through my new artistic talent, in hopes of finding like minded people to build a network with or maybe give some information to another enthusiast using google to try something new. STAY TUNED!!!