I know this is crazy, but I have a cake that needs to feed 500 people with a wheat theme. It's for our church's open house and we're Harvest Church, so hence the wheat theme. I have a few ideas, but I can't come up with a way to do royal icing wheat stalks to put in the cake. I don't know what tip to use to get a 3-D look. Can anyone help??
Can you make the wheat out of gumpaste and lay them on the cake? I made a First Communion cake for DH recently and used GP painted w/ diluted americolor. It dries very hard.
The 1979 Wilton yearbook tells how to do these. It says to insert a 6" length of florist wire into a decorating bag filled with tube 4 yellow royal icing. Squeeze the bag and pull the wire out of tube, coating it with icing. Stick into styrofoam block to dry. Pipe tube 1 yellow pull-out points around top 2" of iced wire. Start at base of cluster and pipe a pair of points on each side of wire, pulling them out at an angle and slowly revolving wire between your fingers as you move up to top of stalk. In other words, pipe two pull-out points, go up a little and pipe two more points inbetween the first two, etc...Also, I saw somewhere (have no idea where) that you could coat spaghetti or angel hair pasta instead of using florist wire. In this case, you might be able to use spaghetti and get away without coating it at all---it may need the base coat of icing for the points to stick, though--not sure, you might try both ways.
In the yearbook there's a picture of a bunch of stalks clustered together with a ribbon tied around the bases--very pretty.
Another "harvest" idea would be to make haystacks using the wondermold or mini wondermold pans and pipe hay with the hair/grass tip. You could also make pumpkins and other fruits and veggies to be harvested. These could be piped or formed out of fondant.
One more thought...
You could pipe a cornocopia on a cake...or use both in a design...just some ideas--hope they help.
Colette Peter's has a cake in her wedding cake book that has wheat stocks and she explains how to do them.
She instructs that using a tip 2 you pike a stem (straight) then you do pull out dots (like you would for a snail dot border) with the tip 2.
If you need me to scan the picture of the stalks for you I will.
Rachel
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