Hello there! Welcome to my sweet little corner of the web again. Today I am going to share with you a fun tutorial for making mini books. These are great for cupcake toppers, and I thought they were rather appropriate with everyone in this house heading back to school this week.
I recently made this storybook cake for a baby shower:
Along with some matching cupcakes.
Since this was the second time I've made these books, and I had a lot of questions about how I made them the first time, I took pictures as I worked so I could write up a tutorial. Hope it makes sense. :o)
The first couple of steps I don't have pictures for, sorry. I went to the library and checked out books that I wanted to use. Then I scanned each side of them, including the spine, into my computer and used PhotoShop to put the pieces together. Then I laid them out in a document to fit as many as I could on a sheet of wafer paper at about the size I wanted them to be. I actually could have made them a bit smaller and they would have looked fine. The next step was to use my edible printer to print the book covers onto wafer paper.
Once they are dry to the touch, you need to cut them out. I used a paper cutter, but you could easily use scissors for this as well. Then I measured the size I wanted for the pages and cut them with the paper cutter as well. Now, my inside pages were blank. You could print these as well, but that was WAY more work than I was willing to do. I liked that I could stack a couple of sheets and cut them at the same time. This was also a good way to use some of my wafer paper that got kind of crushed in transit to my house. (You can see the torn corner on this one.)
The next step is to glue the pages together. I used a paint brush to apply piping gel just to the "spine" edge of the paper and then stacked another one on top. I think I did 6-8 pages/book. Depending on the spine, you could do more, but these were children's books, so they're not very thick.
Now, back to the covers. You need to roll out some fondant. I think I went to 3 or 4 on my KitchenAid pasta roller. (LOVE my pasta roller!) You could go thinner if you'd like. Once rolled out, I used piping gel all over the backside of the book covers and "glued" them to the fondant. Then I used an exact-o knife to cut around the edges.
It helps to fold the book in half for this next step just to help you see where the spine is. Fold it, and then lay it out, with the inside face up. Run a line of piping gel right along the spine.
And then "glue" your pages inside. The fun part about this is that the book can be somewhat opened to see the individual pages inside.
Because the covers are made with fondant, they edges tend to get a little ragged with handling.
Simply tap the edges on your table top, and that will push in any fondant that may have squished beyond the wafer paper edge and kind of even things out a bit. You'll want to do this on all three of the cut edges.
Ta-da! Nice and smooth.
And there you have it. Lots of cute mini books to decorate with. These can be made several days ahead to make things easier on baking/decorating day.
If you don't have an edible printer, I've heard there are places where you can send your picture and they will print it for you. I just don't know who they are. You could also simply wrap the wafer paper pages with fondant, let it dry a bit and paint your book cover with food coloring or edible pens. A Bible would be pretty easy to do with this technique as you would really only have to draw a cross on it.
I hope this tutorial will be of help. These really are fun to make, and there's just something about miniature things that are just so fun to play with. :o)
Till next time...
God's love and blessings!
