Gummy

One of the things I’m becoming known for in cake decorating circles is experimenting with and demonstrating basic through advanced techniques with gummy.

What’s gummy? Think gummy bears, only much, much more. Basically, by adding extra gelatin to Jello and then using a baster to apply that to molds, silicone sheets, and texture mats, you can do everything from make your own homemade gummy candies with your kids to achieving spectacular professional cake decorating results. Gummy is an easy, safe, inexpensive alternative to sugar or isomalt for applications where you want translucent effects. The downside is it’s not hard like sugar or isomalt, but the more significant upside is it’s flexible!

I’ve done demonstrations of this new medium for the Capital Confectioners’ Day of Sharing in Austin, the Houston Cake Club’s Day of Sharing, and an ICES Day of Sharing in Fort Worth. These demonstrations have been wildly popular with tons of positive feedback. I’ve also taught classes in Austin. I’m available for demos and classes for other groups upon request (far travel may require travel costs to be covered, depending on the nature of the event).

I’m also working on a book to eventually be self-published and made for reasonably-priced sale, but I keep developing new techniques so fast that the book can’t keep up! In the meantime, I’ll soon be offering low-cost PDFs/ebooks on specific advanced techniques, so sign up for email alerts from this blog to find out when those are available.

UPDATE: the first ebook is now available!

To see what I’ve been playing with lately or follow the history of my experimentation, browse the Gummy category. I just accidentally invented chocolate gummy too, so look for more experiments with that soon!

The Basics

Basic Gummy Tutorial The recipe and basic technique are all there for you to learn about and play with, totally free! And it’s so easy, my then-five-year-old daughter is the one doing most of the work in the photos.

Intermediate Applications

Using professional quality molds, you can do things like make gummy beads on a string:

Or fuse multiple colours together to make Lego minifigs:

Or you can make your own mold out of buttercream, like this one of my own hand:

Or apply edible markers and have a nice day:

Or spray it with edible silver:

And if you don’t like silver carbonite, you’re not limited to that colour:

Advanced Applications

Well there’s this:

And this:

Which you can turn into this:

Or this:

And then there’s this:

These techniques already have some big-name fans like Ruth Rickey, Mike McCarey, Nick Lodge, and Lauren Kitchens. Stay tuned because this could be about to take the cake world by storm…

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I needed to supply head shots for some presentations, so here I am holding the sailboat gummy stained glass I made for my Flexible, Edible Stained Glass eBook. The first is me pretending to be professional, the second…not so much…

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Gummy Links

Here are some other blogs and websites I’ve found about Gummy and/or Jello art. Note that most Jello recipes should work as gummy simply by adding more gelatin in the proper proportions.

Jello Mold Mistress

Joy of Jello