Yeah! Do you coat the finished product with anything to seal it? Some of the food appears to have a shiny appearance. I prefer that over the dull finish most FIMO has.
Anne
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Yeah! Do you coat the finished product with anything to seal it? Some of the food appears to have a shiny appearance. I prefer that over the dull finish most FIMO has.
Anne
OK, here goes. Basic instructions for cinnamon buns like the ones at AGP. Buy any kind of polymer clay: FIMO, Sculpey or PREMO. You need tan and a cinnamon color. Burnt Sienna is a good cinnamon color. You will also need glossy varnish for Sculpey or Gloss acryllic medium, a dab of yellow ochre and a dab of burnt sienna acryllic paint. To work with FIMO you need a glass surface to roll on, a roller of some kind and a knife (kitchen or exacto). Line a cookie sheet with aluminum foil. Preheat the oven to 265 degrees, but no higher. You also need a paint brush, wax paper and something to mix your paint & gloss in. I use the white plastic lids from cottage cheese or cream cheese containers as a palette.
Cut off about 1/4 of a package of clay and knead it until it's pliable enough to roll it out on the glass. Make two snakes (long rolls), one of tan and one of brown. Flatten each snake with a roller. Doll's wooden rolling pins stick to the clay -- I use a piece of metal pipe. Lay the brown clay flat on top of the tan clay. Cut the two layers into strips about 1/2 an inch wide. Don't smush the layers together on any left over edges. (Leftovers should be peeled apart and rolled again separately, then use them to make more buns.) Roll the strip until it's the size you want your bun to be. Maybe 3/4 of an inch? Cut through your jellyrolled strip. Turn it so the spiral of color shows on top. Use your fingers to smooth out the tail where you cut it and to round over the top. Buns have a raised section in the center so pinch the clay up a little in the middle and then smooth it down all around the sides. Gently lift the bun and place it bottom side down on the cookie sheet. Repeat until you have enough buns or run out of clay.
Bake the buns on your foil-lined cookie sheet in a 260 or 265 oven (NOT a convection oven!!!) for about 20 minutes. I always get hungry when I smell FIMO baking! Let them cool for about 10 minutes before moving them to a sheet of wax paper on your work surface.
Mix your sticky-bun colored glaze, starting with only a tiny touch of color. You can always add more paint but it's wasteful to dilute too much color with the gloss medium.
Got to go meet with my boss -- will continue later.
That is pretty amazing.
How working gets in the way of the Host Board! Sorry about that. So anyway, you mix tiny amounts of acryllic paint into a glop of gloss medium.
Pick up the cinnamon bun with your forefinger on the top of it and your thumb on the bottom and paint the glaze around all the sides. You'll get sticky and painty -- no help for that. Put the bun down on the waxed paper and paint the top of it, smoothing the glaze down over the sides.
For the types of buns that you get at AGP, that's all there is to it. If you want to turn your buns into Felicity's Queen cakes, you can add one more touch. After the glaze is dry, put just a touch of white craft glue on the pointed top of the bun and dip it into white glitter. This makes the bun look like it has a sugar coating.
If your glaze is too pale, you can do a second coat after the first one is dry. The buns in my photo were actually glazed three times, each time being a very light covering.
Cautionary note: if you have used acryllic gloss medium as the base for your glaze, you'll need to store your cinnamon buns wrapped in waxed paper because acryllic medium remains permanently tacky and the buns will tend to stick together. Sculpey gloss varnish dries hard and not sticky.
Most of the other cookies you can see in the New Year's party were cut out from FIMO that was rolled flat. For a couple of years, I made a cardboard pattern, laid it down on the rolled out clay and cut around the pattern with an exacto knife. Eventually I started collecting doll-sized cookie cutters. You can use candy molds, butter pat molds or make your own mold from seasonal decorations (Sculpey has a flexible mold compound that I haven't tried using yet). When working with molds, grease the mold lightly with a tiny dab of handcream and then "flour" them with a fine layer of talcum powder before you press the clay into them.
Acryllic paint does very well for frosting, plus it can act like a glue, too. Standard glitter can be added to cookies, etc. by either shaking it over a wet painted surface or spread a thin layer of craft glue over the surface and dunk the cookie in the glitter. Lately I've been experimenting with adding embossing powders on top of FIMO and baking it. The heat which is safe for FIMO isn't quite hot enough for embossing powder but, unlike glitter, it doesn't shake off easily after it's baked. Obviously if you use plastic beads as decorations, don't bake them. Glue them on later!
A note on convection ovens. A friend of mine wanted to make FIMO violets for her African violet club so I took my clays over to her house. Some violets are striped or have subtle variations of color in their petals, so we tried hard to shade petals from white to pink, etc. She only has a convection oven and we were dismayed when the first batch of flowers came out solid pink. After all our efforts to shade the petals, it turns out that the convection oven does something to stir up the clay molecules and you end up with a solid color that doesn't resemble what you started with at all!
There has been some concern on this Board about baking FIMO, etc. in the oven you use for people food. I've done it for years and haven't been poisoned yet. (sound of body falling -- no, just kidding)
The point is to have fun and if what you make looks like what you wanted, that's good enough. If you make something which turns out distasteful (like my only attempt at making FIMO egg salad sandwiches), then you've learned not to do that again. I taught a group of giggling 12 year olds how to make FIMO food for their AGs during a birthday party once. Those girls made big Macs, french fries, any kind of food they could think of. Some of their attempts weren't going to fool an outsider into snacking but their dolls thought everything was delicious and the increasing hilarity, as sheet after sheet of doll food came out of the oven, emboldened the FIMO artists to ever-climbing levels of culinary ambitions! Think Julia Childs and buy yourself some clay soon!
That is pretty amazing.
That sounds like a fun project!! That will have to be added to my list of things to do in '05!!
Thanks Cherry for the details on how to make the cinnamon rolls. I'm going to try them soon.
Last Saturday I picked up the February issue of the UK magazine "Dolls House and Miniature Scene" which includes a supplement on how to make miniature food. It's all for doll house sizes but they can be made the size for AG's and they have some interesting tips to add materials to unbaked fimo, like semolina flour when making bread and cakes as it will leave tiny air pockets, or poppy seeds in place of currents, or nutmeg for cocoa, or sesame seeds to imitate almonds. Although I think those would be more suitable for doll house food, but one could always experiment.
Going to have some busy weeks or even months ahead.
I've never thought of using actual food ingredients! Interesting. On the other hand, I keep my FIMO food for years and things like flour tend to attract insects.
Some "chemical additives" I've tried include: glass beads of various sizes for chocolate chips in cookies or ice cream, glitter mixed into the cinnamon colored clay in cinnamon rolls to make the clay look sugary within the roll and the plastic beads that are sold to make fake stained glass window ornaments. You can also make small pieces of FIMO, bake them, then include them in a larger FIMO item. For example, when I was little one of my favorite penny candies was a chunk of nougat that was pink on one end and white on the other, and had chunks of fruit and nuts all through it. So I rolled very tiny green, red and beige bits of clay and baked them. Then I mixed the baked bits into pink and white chunks of clay, stuck the two larger chunks together and shaped them into a rectangle. I baked the large rectangle for about 10 minutes -- so the FIMO had started to set but wasn't hard yet -- took it out and cut it into bricks the right shape for candy. Then I put it back in the oven and baked it again for about 15 minutes. The sliced pieces showed sections of the small colored bits I baked first.
FIMO and other polymer clays can be added to. You can use a push mold to make roses, bake the roses, then cut out heart shaped "cakes" and press the rose into the center of each cake and bake the cake and rose together. The rose becomes part of the cake.