I’m back from QVC training.  The Kaleidoscope Heart and Butterfly Molds will be featured there soon.  I’ll post the date when it’s finalized.

So I finally had time to have some fun with the prototype Puppy Mold.  Here are cake, cookie and chocolate puppies of various breeds.

Chocolate Lab Puppy

Dalmation Puppy Cookie

Yellow Lab Cake

Umm, this is a poodle...

PUPPY CAKE

Here’s a sneak peek at our newest design, which will be available for the 2009 holiday season.  As with all Zanda Panda designs, this mold can be used for cake, cookies, chocolate, gelatin, etc., as well as for many arts and crafts projects.

I think the puppy would be adorable in chocolate with a big fondant bow, or as a cake with tiny dots of piped icing to make it a poodle pup.  Decorate-your-own puppy cookies would be a big hit at kid’s parties, too!

Easy to make Butterfly Cupcakes. Butterflies are molded from the Kaleidoscope Butterfly Topper/Chocolate/Cookie Mold

These cupcakes are ridiculously simple to make and look adorable.  With the pastel colors, they would be great for a child’s birthday party or especially cute for a baby shower.  You can adjust how you make these to the amount of time that you have.  If you have spare time, bake the cupcakes and make icing and edible clay from scratch.  If you’re in a rush, buy ready made cupcakes and pastel fondant from the crafts store.

For the butterflies in the photo I used ready-made fondant.  Just press a small amount into the mold for each butterfly and add the small dots and antennae in a contrasting color.  If the fondant starts to dry, add a bit of moisture to the ‘dot’ and press onto the wing.

I also folded them slightly so their wings weren’t flat.  I leaned them on the edge of the plate until the fondant firmed up, then arranged them on the icing.

Thanks Spatulatta!

We are very happy to announce that Spatulatta’s blog picked Zanda Panda’s Kaleidoscope Heart Mold as one of it’s top ten picks from the 2009 International Home and Housewares Show.

Spatulatta’s site has lots of great videos of kids teaching kids through video recipes.  You can check it out their fun and informative site at:  http://www.spatulatta.com/

Zanda Panda Kaleidoscope Heart Mold

6. Zanda Panda Silicone Heart Mold

Sandra Lira, the designer, started as a sculptor and used silicone for molding bronze. One day it dawned on her that she could put her skills to work in the kitchen. She observed that children would bicker over who was going to get the decoration on a cake so she decided to make the whole cake a decoration.

She has a number of designs of cake and chocolate molds some of which have hand sculpted unicorns. I especially liked the heart mold. It’s perfect for shortbeard because it’s deeply scored. You can easily divide the cake into 8 individual heart shapes. Sandra uses the mold for chocolate, painting red chocolate into the small hearts before pouring milk chocolate into the rest of the mold. She then uses edible Luster Dust to highlight the flowers and curlicues.

Molds are also great for crafts. They form plaster of paris or paper maché as easily as cake batter.

Craft Demo: Polymer Clay Jewelry. Heart and Butterfly Polymer Clay Pins made with Zanda Panda Specialty Bakeware's Kaleidoscope Collection Molds

POLYMER CLAY JEWELRY DEMO

There’s a new demo up on making Polymer Clay Jewelry.  The demo is on making butterfly and heart-shaped pins from Zanda Panda’s  Kaleidoscope Collection molds.  The same method used in the demo to create polymer clay pins can be used for pendants and appliqués for trinket boxes, hair ornaments, refrigerator magnets, handmade soap , cast paper and other crafts.

Actually, to make cookies or chocolate, confectionary coating or edible clay appliqués to embellish cakes, cupcakes, etc., you pretty much use the same method, just the material differs.  Everything’s easy with Zanda Panda

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Heart-Healthy Cream Cheese Cake

This cake is very easy to make, even for kid chefs and novice bakers.  The recipe has lots of room for experimentation to give it your own special twist.  It also uses the tub from the cream cheese to measure the other ingredients, so clean-up is very easy.

The recipe is an adaptation of a heart-healthy cake recipe by Paula76 in reply to a Chowound post on heart-healthy cake recipes (http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/574561), for use with the Zanda Panda Kaleidoscope Heart Mold.

Recipe at: http://www.zandapanda.com/H-HCCCake.asp.

Tanya at Take the Cannoli blog did a really great review of the Zanda Panda Kaleidoscope Butterfly Topper/Cookie Mold.  Here’s a link if you need to paste it in your browser http://www.takethecannoli.us/?p=374#comment-1375

Butterfly Sugar Cookie

Thanks Tanya!

There’s an informal video on the Zanda Panda website to you to show you how to make two-tone cookies and adorable mini sandwich cookies in heart and butterfly shapes using your Zanda Panda Kaleidoscope molds.  You can make ice cream sandwiches with the two-tone cookies by filling with your favorite ice cream, frozen yogurt or sorbet. Fill sandwich cookies with your favorite icing or melted chocolate.  Use gel food coloring to get the really bright colors.  They’re really fun to make!

(http://www.zandapanda.com/kaleidoscopecookies.asp#CookieVid)

We’ll be in Booth # 3571 at the International Housewares Show in Chicago, March 22-24, 2009.

We’re very near the GOHO Cooking Theater in the South Building.  If you’re attending the show and are planning on seeing any of the celebrity chefs, please stop by after.

Some of the chefs that will be demonstrating are Paula Deen, Ming Tsai, Tyler Florence, Masaharu Morimoto, Rocco DiSpirito, Todd English and Rick Bayless.  Here’s the schedule for the GOHO Theater.

Kaleidoscope Cookies!

Kaleidoscope Cookies!

Check out our new demo on Kaleidoscope Cookies.  It shows how to make two-toned Heart and Butterfly cookies, which you can also use to make ice cream sandwiches.  Also mini sandwich cookies that are very cute!  There will be a link to an informal video on how to make them soon, but for now, check it out in stills.

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