FIMO food - tips?

[Stephanie31802]

I don't remember who it was here who was making that beautiful food with Fimo but I was wondering is she (or anybody else) would give us some tips on how to make different types of food. Years ago, when I was about 11, I made some food with Fimo for my AG dolls. All I really made was cookies because that's all I could figure out how to make. My girls would love some more nutrious foods after years of eating sweets! Any tips?

[QNPoohBear]

That would be Cherry (Sakurako). I will let her know to post some tips on here when she gets a chance. She reads the boards at work, and unfortuneately, work comes first and she does not have a home PC.

[Sakurako]

How about mac & cheese? Here's a real shortcut. Buy the color of acryllic paint that looks like Kraft cheese sauce. I think it's made by "Plaid" or someone -- not Liquitex. Buy some nice cheap doll dishes. Pier 1 used to have terrific soy sauce dishes, white with a nice rim. Arrange as much uncooked macaroni as you think proper for a single serving on the dish and pour the paint cheese sauce over it. It will dry overnight. The paint glues the macaroni to the dish. The cheapest serving dish for this is the aluminum mini-pie plates that come under individual sized graham cracker crusts -- 6 in a package -- not elegant but nearly free!

For years I've been struggling to get bread texture to look right and, thanks to Miki, I've finally figured it out. You will need a box of Farina cereal, some white Sculpey (it's stickier than FIMO) and maybe some beige Sculpey or FIMO if you want whole wheat bread. I've been making molds of bread by pressing Molly's PBJ sandwich into Sculpey and baking the resulting impression. But you can just cut the bread slices into triangles, too. Knead the sculpey until it's soft. If you're making wheat bread, mix the white into the wheat-colored Sculpey so you don't get too much white to start with. When the clay is nice and soft, pour a tablespoon of Farina into a small saucer. Roll the Sculpey around in the Farina until it's covered with cereal granules. Knead the clay again until it's swallowed all the cereal. Repeat until the mixture is too stiff to work any more. Roll out flat and cut into triangles that look to be a good sized half sandwich to you. Now you can add the filling: plain brown and red for PBJ, or make slices of bologna, cheese, etc. My favorite is cucumber sandwiches but you have to make the cucumbers ahead of time. I've even made cream cheese (white sculpey) and olives (small green cane with a red center, sliced thin). Place your sandwich filling between two triangles of bread, press gently and bake in a 275 degree oven for about 25 minutes. When cool, you can paint the two short sides of the triangle to look like bread crust.

Cucumbers and carrots are made in "canes". Canes work best if you start off with a length of 3 inches. A cane is a rolled up piece of clay. For carrots, roll a very thin snake of orange. Flatten a piece of yellow with a rolling pin so it's the same length as the orange snake and wide enough to wrap all the way around the snake. Wrap the orange snake in a thin layer of yellow and roll them together gently to seal the seam. Then flatten out another piece of orange that is as long as your snake, wide enough to wrap around it and at least twice as thick as the yellow. Wrap the snake in the thick orange blanket and roll gently. Cut the ends off clean with a sharp knife (exacto is good). Refrigerate your cane for 20 minutes. Then slice off your carrots. Bake for 15 minutes because they're thin.

With cucumbers, you need to mix a very small amount of green with a much larger amount of translucent clay. Then mix a little black into your remaining green clay to get a nice dark green cucumber skin color. Roll the translucent pale green clay into a snake. Wrap it in the darker green. Refrigerate. Slice with a sharp knife. For seeds, prick one side of each slice with a doll's fork in a crossways pattern. For tomatoes, make a larger diameter snake of translucent red, wrap it with a red skin, refrigerate and slice. Mark the center of each slice with indentations (I used a 6-pointed pronged tool) -- everyone thinks it looks exactly like tomatoes and it isn't worth the extra work to make all those inner sections. Believe me! For lettuce, mix lime green fimo with translucent. Don't overmix -- the variations in color look more realistic. I made lettuce molds from Addy's lettuce (in her gardening set) and from an old AGT lunch salad. But lettuce is really just round, torn on the edges and wrinkly in the middle. So experiment.

Peapods are fun. Find a nice pea green color clay or make it by adding a small amount of white and yellow to green. Make lots of little round beads for peas. Then flatten out the remainder with a rolling pin and use an exacto knife to cut out peapod shapes (long, sort of tapering on each end, wider in the middle). Tuck three tiny peas on top of one pod. Cover with another slice of pod and squeeze the back edge of the two pods together, plus the ends. Let the peas show on the front side. All veggies are thin so need only 15 minutes in a 275 degree oven. DON'T OVERBAKE!

OK -- someone else's turn.

<font color="#051E50" size="1">[ March 28, 2005 04:18 PM: Message edited by: Sakurako ]</font>

[MareGathersWords]

Thanks for the great post, Cherry! I saved it for future refrence. [img]smile.gif[/img]

[Stephanie31802]

Wow, Cherry. Thanks a lot for your suggestions. I'm definetly going to try them. I'll take picture when I do! Thanks again!

[Sakurako]

Here's one more word to the wise. I kept thinking about this thread last night as I spent 4 hours meticulously kneading farina into my taco-colored Sculpey mixture, making lettuce leaves using my mold and then carefully slicing them and making a tomato cane before slicing and quartering the tomatoes. (I had previously shredded and baked Sculpey yellow, which is an excellent color for cheddar.) All this so I could use all my new knowledge to make tacos. I made tacos quite a few years ago, the easy way. You know what, friends? The easy way is just as effective as what I put myself through last night!

So here is the easy way to make tacos. You will need translucent Sculpey, lime green FIMO, red, yellow, white and beige clay in whatever you can find. For tools, you need an exacto knife, an old cheese grater and a round cookie cutter -- I used one with a two inch diameter -- and a rolling pin.

Mix a small amount of lime green FIMO into about twice the amount of translucent Sculpey. This will make a good lettuce color. If it's too soft to grate, refrigerate it first. Grate the yellow, green and red into separate piles. You should always work with red LAST because it gets all over everything that's lighter. Start with a chunk of yellow, add some beige and some white and keep mixing until you get a good taco color. You can mix some Farina into your "dough" to add texture and bulk -- so you can get more tacos! Roll it out to about 1/8 inch thickness and cut it into circles with the cookie cutter. You can keep kneading and rolling out the leftovers until you don't have enough left for the circle.

Lay all the taco circles out flat on a foil covered cookie sheet. Preheat your oven to 275 degrees. Starting with the green shreds, then red, then yellow, lay your taco filling on one side of each circle. Make sure there's some green showing at the top of the circle! Fold the circle in half and pinch the sides gently. If your taco isn't full enough, tuck in some more ingredients. Bake for about 15 minutes. This should not take you the 4 hours I spent and it will look just about as good as my tacos did!

[Stephanie31802]

Cherry,
I LOVE your taco "recipe"! Thanks so much, I can't wait to try it!
Stephanie

[Sakurako]

Oh, I forgot. I think I've mentioned it in previous threads on working with polymer clays-- if your clay (especially FIMO) is too stiff to work with, add a small amount of translucent Sculpey to it. Especially if you want to work in Farina later, you need your clay to be not too stiff. The rule of thumb is to add the smallest amount of translucent that you can if you want to preserve the color -- or start with translucent and add the smallest amount of color that you can if you want the filmy inside parts of lemons, cukes, tomatoes, etc.

And for adventurous souls who want to try something complicated, following a recipe is a good thing to do when making doll food. I like cookbooks with color photos to give me something to work from. I make the ingredients first, sometimes in their whole uncut forms, then I follow the recipe and make my entree exactly the way I would if I were using real food instead of clay ingredients. When you get all done, the underneath layers probably won't show. But having sliced mushrooms, chunks of chicken, peas, etc. mixed in with the rice (as an example) gives the final result the correct volume. It is extra work but I find it satisfying to know that even though they can't be seen, all those things are really contained in the final product.

[AG DRESS DESIGNER]

Thanks for sharing this info Cherry. I'm planning to make FIMO food with my GD'S this summer.

[Sakurako]

Thanks to a friend in my office and to Lindy for her fast footwork in setting up the album, you can see a picture of "gomoku sushi" in AG Dress Designer's thread for my recent FIMO food. This shows what I was talking about when I said that following the recipe and including all the ingredients in the rice, even if they don't actually show, gives the proper volume to the dish. I suppose it would have worked just as well to mound up a pile of rice in the dish and then to add the toppings. But I prefer as much "reality" in my settings and accessories as possible.