Gumpaste Frogs- A Tutorial by Kam

Recently, Jaden's favorite movie to watch is The Triplets of Belleville. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it as a kids' movie, though. It's really dark and weird and well, yah, you'll have to watch it yourself (plenty of it on youtube). But, what can I say. All of our kids love it too.

So, of course, she chose that as the theme for her birthday. For the cake, Aurora decided to cover a sheet cake with frog pieces. Once again, hard to explain if you haven't seen the movie. (Though if you watch from about 4:05 on this link, you'll get the gist.)

We all sat down to sculpt them out of gumpaste, but Jenny was the only one who was able to make anything presentable. My frogs were so ugly that I squashed all of them and made tadpoles instead. And even those managed to look more like sperm than tadpoles. Aurora's attempts were a bit better, but still, Jenny kicked our butts on the frog sculpting front. Then again, she's awesome like that (in a very 'perfectionist, keep going til it works' way, while my personal style is more along the lines of 'meh, good enough').

And guess what, I've got a Don't Do What Donnie Don't Does for you. Don't leave a bunch of gumpaste figures out in the garage during a rainstorm without first double, no, triple checking that your roof doesn't leak. Because ours leaks. And I had no idea that it did. And I actually cried when I saw this.


(And for those of you who are wondering why I would put these in the garage... here's my reasoning. We have a naughty cat and I didn't trust her to not eat these. I thought of putting them in the oven for safe keeping, but I was sure that someone would turn it on without realizing they were in there. Most likely me. No one goes in the garage, so I figured they'd be safe out there.)

So my wonderful sister came over the next day and re-sculpted a cake full of frogs. Isn't she sweet? And I think the second batch turned out even better than the first.





And while she was re-making them, Kam was nice enough to give a tutorial for just how to make this frog. We used cocoa to keep them from sticking and also to give them a nice "fresh from the swamp" color. It totally worked.



Aurora whipped up a sheet cake with some brown/pink cream cheese frosting and we just plunked the frogs down on it.





And this last picture... technically that is one leg and one arm, but I stuck them in there like they were a pair of legs.

Don't tell Jenny.