Sweetie door curtains

I want my sweetie door curtains to be vibrant and fun, as it will be the first thing you see, so it needs to make a good first impression!

This 'experiment' proved to work straight away! I am using dolly mixtures, fizzy cola bottles and marshmallows, I bought some fresh, clean needles to use for this in order to thread the sweets onto the cotton. It works brilliantly as long as I start off with a fairly hard sweet such as the dolly mixtures, because I accidently started with a marshmallow and once there was a bit of weight on it it slid off the bottom! 

I'm being hygienic!

Now I have reached the stage where some of my final experiments may be going into the installation I am making sure that all work surfaces in my kitchen / dining room have been washed thoroughly with Dettol anti-bacterial cleaning fluid. 

Change of plan!

Edible Ivy!

This is my experiment with the edible ivy I want crawling up the right wall in my installation. 

For this experiment I bought a few packets of edible rice paper, green food colouring and writing icing. 

I found an ivy shape on the internet and traced it, then using a stencil I cut a few ivy leaves out of my rice paper. 

This one is the one where I used food colouring to paint the veins of the leaf into the rice paper, and as you can see, they look thick and a bit clunky and clumsy. 

 With the next two leaves on one I used yellow and the other green writing icing, and they turned out fantastically! because the writing nozzle is so small I could create intricate lines for the veins of the leaf... and as a bonus the writing icing sets fairly quickly, so it will not drip, smudge or run! 

 I am creating 4 different sizes of ivy leaf for my wall, so it wont look uniform and rigid. 

I am also going to use yellow, green and white writing icing for the leaves as they are the main colours you see in ivy leaves veins. 

Lickable wallpaper!

For my first experiment with lickable wallpaper I am going to keep it simple and just use freshly squeezed fruit juice and mix with some gelatine to thicken it up into a paste. 

I was stuck with how to display the fruit on the wallpaper because i was originally going to just draw an orange, lemon and lime how they actually look, but it looked boring and not very exciting. 

It finally came to me how to make it more visually appealing after sitting looking at my flowery bedding - I can display them as though they were cut in half showing the segments! 

With the fruit I had to add food colouring because the colour of the freshly squeezed juice is very bland. 

Sadly this experiment did not work out well at all, because when using gelatine in such strong quantities with little other strong flavours to mask it, the gelatine actually has a very distinct, horrible flavour. 

Heston Blumenthal!

After the incident with the mushrooms not wanting to co-operate I decided to watch Heston Blumenthal's Chocolate factory feast that was part of his channel 4 series of feasts. 


In this feast he catered for celebrity guests in a fashion that Willy Wonka would have been proud of. 
He created lickable wallpaper, psychedelic duck a l'orange, a magic mushroom wonderland dish, and a chocolate waterfall. 

2nd Experiment with mushrooms

This is the 2nd experiment for the mushrooms. 

For this experiment I used button mushrooms, royal icing, red food colouring and writing icing. 

I wrapped a button mushroom in royal icing and painted it with red food colouring... then left it to dry over night. 

Once again this experiment did not work, this time it was because the mushroom is smooth and slippery therefore the icing slipped off into a heap underneath the mushroom. 

I then had a quick experiment that I thought would fix the problem... with a button mushroom I gave it a small coating of jam to try and make it sticky, something for the icing to stick to.. but sadly it failed and the icing slid off again.