Neat Stuff: Duff's Stuff

A few weeks ago I was at Michael's and discovered Ace of Cakes' Duff Goldman's new line of cake decorating supplies.

From cake mixes to fondant to "Graffiti".

I'm actually not a huge Ace of Cakes fan.  Don't get me wrong, I watch the show here and there and think that they are amazingly talented but when I saw this small section I scoffed at it.  There's something about a chef branding their names on products that leaves a bad taste in my mouth.  Kind of reminded me of Rachel Ray's line of olive oil she branded as EVOO.  Makes me want to hit something.

And you can see from the prices... this stuff ain't cheap.  After browsing through and making fun of the products, I decided to buy one of the cans of the "Cake Graffiti" just so I could prove how useless it was.  

On the post I did on my friend Jae's decorated cookies I sprayed it over the finished cookie.

You can see what the black looked like before (the top one) and after (the bottom one) the spray.  It gave it a nice silver shimmer to the fondant I used to decorate the cookie with.

For the white it didn't show up quite as well.  For some reason the white didn't soak in the spray as much as the black.  When I sprayed too much it ended up just floating around on top of it.

Even though I thought it was an unnecessary product, I have to admit... it's pretty convenient.  I don't have an air brush machine so these graffiti paint cans (completely edible, of course) comes in pretty handy when you want to give a quick shimmer or color to a cake or decorated cookies like I did.  The normal way to achieve this shimmery look would be to either dust it with Luster Dust or paint with the Luster Dust and alcohol.

(Taken from pastrychef.com)

Then it would have more of an intense metallic look like this R2D2 cookie I made a while back.

(Silver achieved by mixing the luster dust and either a clear extract such as lemon or almond and painting it on the fondant or royal icing after it's completely hardened/dry)

I also used it to give it a little shimmer to the wedding cake I had made recently.  I wish they had a regular shimmery one and not the silver.  It ended up tinting the cake a little gray in the process but it still added the shimmer I was looking for. 

One word of caution though when using the graffiti: be careful when you get to the last bit of spray in the can because it starts to sputter and there are these little dots that end up on whatever it is you're decorating.

Other than that, I'll give Duff's Cake Graffiti a Spatulas Up for this convenient tool.

Oh and an update on the Neat Stuff on Circular Silpats:  I used it on the 6 inch cake and worked beautifully.  :)