Prepping for Austin!

Welcome to my kitchen after my gum paste making extravaganza.

I was totally stoked to be invited to Austin to participate in the Capital Confectioners annual Day of Sharing as one of the demonstrators (this means I needed to prepare a ~1 hour demo) and to stay and teach my 2 day Sexy Gum Paste Stiletto Workshop on the following days.

When I teach my class here at International Sugar Art Collection, all of the supplies and gum paste are taken care of.  Out in Austin, I was coordinating with the fabulous Kyla, who managed to procure many of the supplies, but I still had to bring/ ship a bunch of stuff out there.  Not the least of which was 28 lbs of pre-colored gum paste.  That's right, for a class of 15 students plus myself I needed 10 POUNDS of red gum paste, 6 lbs of navy, and 4 lbs each of white and ivory.  That's a lot of work for my poor kitchen aid. But I did this over the course of a few days.  Let me reiterate:

Yup, powdered sugar strikes again and again.  I made one color per day and put it in my new freezer.  Oh yeah, I'm now the proud owner of no less than 2 refrigerators + the one that is part of my apartment.

So I shipped out my huge box of gum paste and sole formers for the class about a week ahead of time.  Then I started making lists... and lists... and finally a pile:

I don't think you understand how big this pile is, so here's a picture with my foot in it for scaling:

I had to buy a bigger suitcase.  The box you see there is my carry-on with a prototype of each of the red and blue shoes for my class (which made it in one piece!  And made it home almost unscathed but Austin security really jostled it around and the red shoe came unglued and I had a heart attack...)  Everything else in this pile is class/ demo supplies.

So you can see why you hadn't heard from me for a while...

Tomorrow I'll recap the day of sharing!