So first off let me say, I LOVE CAKE CENTRAL! lol Im a total addict now. Ive read thru months of post in the forums and learned amazing new things to do with gelatin, chocolate, and sugar. All of which i had never worked with before. So needless to say i play all of you for your wisdom, lol. But onto what I did today. I have played with the gelatin a little and with some sugar in the last few weeks. I read about make the molds yourself for the beer bottles, and living in the smalltown thats in the middle of nowhere and walmart is an hour and 45 minutes away i had to implement an old trick i saw my mother use once for suckers. So i filled a cake box full of ps and put a full glass bottle in it then filled it with sugar. The result works in the end but only for one-sided bottles. Then I read in a different forum about the chicago mold school, so i looked up there site and was amazed at the show peels. I wanted them so bad. But at $55 a sheet, there was no way. So I was at work one day(I work part time at a hardware store) I was looking at the silicone and it hit me, make my own. So I bought some of those clear report covers and a sharpie marker. I came home that night and brought up a pic on my computer. I saved it, then scaled it to the size i wanted. I taped the report cover over my computer screen and traced the outlines of the pic. Then I took the silicone out put it in my newly acquired caulking gun and spread in out over the design. I waited til morning and peeled the sheet off the silicone. The first one came of great. The second one not so good. (Apparently silicone doesnt like sharpies. Who knew? ) But after i made sure i could get the silicone off the sheets, i placed them back over top of my designs and cut them out with scissors. Now i have 12 different designs in which i can cover with sugar, chocolate or gelatin and it only costed me $4.75 verus $55 a sheet for there design. I tried the sugar out already and it worked great. I spoonedthe sugar onto the silicone, waited for about a minute and peeled it off. Worked great, it was fast and i had time to do a few more with that same design before my sugar became unusable. Today I'm going to try it with the gelatin.....cross your fingers that it works as great. Hope this helps my other smalltown cakers.

Hi there! Welcome to your new addiction! You'll find so much information here!

Making your own molds is definitely cheaper than buying them and it sounds like you have a great technique. I've made some silicone molds of shells and was surprised at how easy it was to do. You may already know this, but i thought it was worth mentioning for other newbies that the silicone you get at the hardware store is not food safe and really should not be used for this purpose.

Michaels sells a make your own mold kit that is food-grade silicone and pretty reasonable with their 40% off coupons. I too, live in the middle of nowhere, and i found it easier to order from this site http://www.culinart.net/silicone.html as i rarely get to Michaels. I found the culinart silicone a little easier to work with also.

I've never worked with sugar or isomalt, but this sounds like something I'd like to try. Thanks for sharing!

Had the same first thought about it not being food safe...

Thought I'd share what we've ran into w/ the gelatin on silicone during all of our "R&D" for the sheets... fwiw...

Using the silicone molds was one of my first thoughts when first playing w/ the gelatin, buuuut... I tried Sunflower SA molds, old Sugar Bouquet molds, silicone plastique molds, etc etc. I found it may work somewhat okay one time and then release waaaaay too early the next time - on the SAME mold. Tried washing them before each use, truly spent quite a bit of time trying to get a constant result (good or bad, just trying to get something consistent...) but never did. Overall, the majority of the time found that it basically releases too early from silicone and ends up shriveling up.

HTH!
Di

hi beachcakes ,
do you know what section do they keep that make-your-own mold kit at michael's?
not with the cake stuff .
thanks!
diane