Sheep!

Sorry for the prolonged absence from the blogging world everyone. I've been taking some time off and haven't had much time for cakeing/blogging. I have a bit of a backlog to post so here goes!

How cute are these sheep?? I'm so happy with the way they turned out. Here's some photos of the process. I started with oval balls of gumpaste and piped royal icing with a small round tip on each for the fur. One of the sheep is actually sitting up (the one on the left) so he wasn't quite oval, more like teardrop shaped? Anyhow...

This proved to be more challenging than I expected. I needed the icing to dry so that I could hold the sheep and pipe the rest of the fur. In order to do that, I stuck some toothpicks in each of the sheep and stuck them into styrofoam. At this time I also attached the head and feet. It took a decent amount of time to pipe all that fur and I had to stop every once in a while to squish down the peaks form the icing.

The heads and feet were made of black fondant -- I didn't have any black gumpaste and did NOT feel like coloring some. We all know how much fun that is, right? ;). I just added some tylose to my fondant to make sure it dried hard. Promptly after that I tipped the tylose container into the sink :(.

That is a LOT of wasted tylose powder! Sigh.

For the head, I started with a small ball and rolled it around a bit until I got a shape that would look good. Similar idea for the feet. Took some trial and error.

Here they are, all furred up and ready for some character. I used an xacto knife to make the "Y" impressions for their noses.

The eyes and ears are made of gumpaste/fondant attached with gum glue. I let them set overnight and they were ready to go! 

They looked perfect on my the sheep themed cake I made for a friend (blog post coming soon!).

Now, these all turned out great, but this was not a first attempt...there was a dud. I tried to copy a sheep I'd seen on a cake and... lets just say it didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped. 

The dud: