I got a new toy from Ebay this week: the Cricut Create Mini.
Tonight, Emily and I got it out of the box and gave it a test drive. Our first creation is this snowflake cake.
Not a masterpiece, but we had fun making it. We learned a lot that will help us next time. Here's a few pictures and notes about what we did.
The first thing we did was bake and ice a cake. We used the Wilton buttercream icing recipe and added blue gel coloring. For the snowflakes and border, we used Wilton gum paste. To prepare the gum paste, Emily kneaded it a few minutes to heat and soften it.
Next, we rolled it out to about 1/8". We had a little trouble at first with it sticking to the counter, so we used a pastry brush and put a thin coat of shortening on the counter.
The Cricut Cake mats do not have adhesive. In order to make the gum paste stick to the mat, we brushed it with shortening.
Next we put the gum paste on the mat and trimmed the edges, then loaded the mat into the Cricut. If you are familiar with Cricut functions, you will have no problem operating the Cricut Cake. It works basically the same.
All my Cricut cartridges also work in the Cricut Cake. Tonight, we cut out a few snowflakes from the new Art Philosophy cartridge. Generally, you will want to cut fairly simple designs on the Cricut Cake.
On our first attempt, the gum paste slid a little on the mat as it was being cut. In this picture you can see how the start and ending points did not line up.
To fix the sliding on round two, we rolled over the gum paste with the rolling pin after placing it on the mat. This helped adhere it and we didn't have any more issues with sliding. We also cut out a scalloped border (also from the Art Philosophy cartridge) to put around the base of the cake.
To decorate the cake, we simply placed the cut out images on the cake.
We decided it needed a little more decoration and used the remaining icing to add a shell border and piping on the flakes.
I think we may have over-decorated just a tad. But once the icing is in the bag, it is so hard to stop.