How To Make Gum Paste
Making gum paste is easy and will enable you to make lovely decorations for your cakes and cupcakes. You don’t need to be a baking wizard to make your own gum paste.
Get your twelve teaspoons of tylose, eight cups of powdered sugar, four eggs and vegetable shortening ready.
Start by sifting your sugar into a bowl or jug. Add four egg whites to your mixing bowl and put your mixer on high speed for a few seconds, just to allow them to break up.
Change your mixer to a slow speed and slowly start adding your sugar, giving it time to mix with your egg whites before adding more. Add approximately seven cups of sugar. You can then turn your mixer up to a medium speed allowing your mixture to thicken slightly and become shiny and soft.
Turn your mixer back down to slow and add your tylose, this will harden your mixture. Leave it to mix for a little while, as it continues to harden. It should be stiff and gummy at this point.
You will know you have the right consistency if you find your mixture is hard to mix around the bowl by hand, but still looks creamy.
Place any leftover sugar onto wax paper and add your mixture on top. Mix it together by hand as if you were kneading dough. Putting a bit of Cristo on your hands will prevent it from sticking to you; continue to knead it until it stops being sticky.
At this point your gumpaste mixture should have a soft and pliable texture to it, don’t worry if it feels slightly grainy this will disappear when it relaxes overnight. Keep kneading it while it hardens up. Remember that different humidifies will affect the texture of your mixture.
Cover your paste in Crisco and wrap in plastic wrap or put it in a zip lock bag in the fridge overnight to relax. When you take it out the next day it will be ready for you to design some fantastic decorations and add them to your cake for any occasion. Now that you know how to make gum paste, there is no reason why you shouldn’t do this for future cake decorating adventures. The video shown here used the Tylose recipe.
