#behindthegish

Thank you! And it’s not printed- it’s painted! In the words of the teammate who made them:

It’s a 5-layer stencil I made then touched up with a brush. I printed a photo of a painting of Trudeau, then traced it out on acetate to make the stencils, cut them out, lay them over the sugar wafer paper, and painted the food dye on with brushes & sponges. Then I wrapped it in fondant with a frame cut out. 

The wafer sheets don’t dry out as fast as fondant, so it’s more forgiving, but the texture doesn’t quite match the fondant. That’s where the crackle effect comes from - the wafer sheets. 

PS - the wafer paper tastes like royal icing! You can find it at cake decorating shops. –Jez

Our Trudeaunut submission

An unexpected side effect of a team member being featured on the Gish website: a few teams chose the Gish site to replicate for their needlepoint webpage, and therefore replicated her picture! A few of them were kind enough to share their images and info with us so we could post them here.

1. Created by Devin for Team Gish’s Bishes

2. Created by Diana for Team YetAnotherChimera

3. Created by Cortney for Team Cat Steel. You can see more of her work at Coco’s Hoopla on Instagram and Facebook (@cocoshoopla)

And there was a further surprise after the hunt-- one of the above was tweeted by Gish at the end of August! So not only was her image featured by Gish, but a replication of her image was also featured! 

Or, An Exercise in Disportionate Effort.  Food art items are my favorite.  Last year’s Girl with a Pearl Earring pizza taught me I’ve got a little bit of a knack for food portraiture.  There’s a skill for the resume, alright.  

Trudeaunut was my nemesis.  I despised the donut.  I cursed the donut.  I cursed baking.  Flour.  Frosting.  Trudeaunuts.  I tried to convince anyone else on the team to take my donuts.  “No, Jez.  I don’t want your donuts,” they’d say.  Then we’d laugh, and I’d devolve into cursing and sputtering about how much I hate donuts.  And maple syup.  And Trudeau’s face.

I tried making a mold of a Ken doll’s face to sculpt my maple-flavored donut holes.  Trudeaunut’s face turned out to be a spiced maple mush.  I tried wrapping it in fondant.  It looked more like a marshmallow than a Prime Minister.  Painting food coloring over powdered sugar was an embarrassing mess that I don’t want to talk about.  My kitchen smelled like spiced maple heaven and looked like a confectionery apocalypse.  But I learned how to make donuts.  Jelly donuts.  Maple buttercream donuts.  Cinnamon-maple custard donuts.

Before the hunt, we heard the devastating news that a fellow Gisher had passed away suddenly. Here at Team Scrumtrulescent, we very much see each other as family, and can hardly imagine the loss of a teammate. We wanted to do something special for the @shenanig8rs  during this year’s hunt, whether we got points for it or not. Reading though the list, item 105, the reverse advent, jumped out at us as the perfect item to do so. 

To honor Carol and her close bond with her Shenanig8r family, Team Scrumtrulescent sponsored a crocodile (a close cousin of the fun-loving Shenanig8r) in her name through the Wold Wildllife Fund.

While working our way through the Gishwhes escape room for this year’s item 204, imagine our surprise when we spotted one of our submissions from the 2015 hunt!