What's Cookin'?

What's Cookin'?

"A bowl of soup?" you ask.

 "Nope, try again," I say.

"Looks like pho," you say.

"No, I'm not really that into pho," I reply.

  "Ramen, perhaps?"

"Yes and no."

"What do you mean, 'yes and no'?"

"What do YOU mean, 'yes and no'?"

"...what?"

"Knock, knock..."

"Look, will you just tell me what it is!"

It's fondant, baby!  Fondant ramen.  I've somehow Frankensteined my favorite college dinner with my cake decorating hobby.

Stats:

• MMF bowl
• MMF extruded noodles
• edible varnish + brown food coloring as the soup

I've had the idea of making a ramen cake since my birthday in November, but was too lazy to do it.  Now that I've been experimenting with some things, it was a great opportunity to recreate my favorite <$0.25 meal.  I bought some Tylose powder (brand name for stuff that helps make gum paste) to try out mixing it with my marshmallow fondant.  After covering a cereal bowl with plastic wrap, I draped a layer of MMF over it and cut the excess.  It dried for 48 hours, but still wasn't as hard as I would have liked it.  Perhaps I should experiment with pastillage.

It's been a while since I practiced with the extruder.  For the noodles I tried the disc with multiple small holes.  I called it quits after extruding 5 different logs of fondant that only partially filled the fondant bowl.  Each log was mixed with a lump of shortening to soften it up.  It was definitely more difficult to turn the extruder with the lumps that had less shortening.

I've been wanting to try out the edible varnish recipe from cakecentral.com (here).  Unfortunately during the process the mixture accumulated many bubbles.  Hopefully my fellow cakecentral members will answer my plea for how to make the varnish sans bubblies.  After mixing in a blob of brown food coloring gel, it looked good enough to eat.

There's a real bowl underneath the fondant bowl.  It's there for insurance.  I was scared that the varnish was hot enough to melt the fondant, but it did fine.  The noodles, however, did seem to sink and soften a bit.

At the moment the "soup" is about the consistency of a Jello Jiggler.  Perhaps tomorrow it'll be rock hard.  This has been a very enlightening experiment.  A version of this will most likely be my "Special Techniques Not On A Cake" entry in the competition.

Unfortunately I'm all out of real ramen :(