-How to Make a Bow From Chocolate!! _ Georgia's Cakes

Hi, welcome back to my channel. Now as promised, following on from my last video, in this tutorial I'm going to show you how I made my chocolate bow that I used to decorate my mega Valentine's Day cake. Before I get started I wanted to say that this isn't my original recipe. I have put in the links below where I found this original recipe but I thought to do a step-by-step tutorial on how I created it. All you need for this is some gelatin. I'm using vegetarian gelatin, some water and some chocolate and to colour it I've got some edible luster dust. Now you can obviously use any colour you want but I'm going to go for a rosy colour but gold and silver work just as well. When using gelatin you have to do something called bloom it which means kind of activate the gelatin and so with some water I'm going to put it in the bowl of gelatin. The gelatin is going to absorb all this water and almost double in size. At the moment the gelatin's a powder and after it absorbs all the water it's not going to be a powder anymore, it's going to come together as one. All the water's inside, I'm just going to give it a mix to make sure all the gelatin is covered and leave it for about 10 minutes. Once the gelatin has bloomed what I'm going to do is place the chocolate inside and microwave the bowl for 10 seconds. Now 10 seconds doesn't seem like a long time but trust me this chocolate is only a small amount and melts very quickly. You can see just in 10 seconds the chocolate is starting to melt into the gelatin but it's not fully melted so I'm going to go with another 10 seconds in the microwave. So you can see just with 20 seconds in the microwave it's already pretty much melted but not 100% so I'm going to put it in one more time for another 10 seconds for it to fully melt. Now I can see that the chocolate and gelatin have completely melted in with each other I can now pour it onto this non-stick mat. I did try this initially on acetate thinking because it's a shiny surface it would come off but it didn't come off as well so I do advise using a very non-stick mat if you have one. So I'm going to pour on the chocolate and very quickly spread it out with a palette knife. Now this hardens pretty much straight away and you can see how quickly it's setting because I can no longer spread it anymore, it's that quick. It starts to cloud over and if you touch it it feels set and so as tempting as it is to spread it out even more you're just going to have to leave it. I'm going to leave this to fully set for about five minutes. Once it's set it's time to brush over the luster dust so again you can use any colour but I think this rosy red colour is really effective and it was for my valentine's day cake too. So with a food safe paintbrush I'm going to dust over the whole surface. Now you can see on this chocolate it is a little bit textured. I think that the vegetarian gelatin doesn't melt as well as regular gelatin does however the side underneath is still smooth so I'm not too worried that it's textured on this side. Even though this is going to be the underside of the bow I still want to colour it because the bow is going to be 3D you will see some of the underneath so it's best to cover this whole surface with the dust. And now it's time to flip it over so I'm going to carefully lift it up from the mats and flip it over and it should stay in one piece. Very satisfying and you can also see how shiny it is. Now I'm going to do exactly the same thing on the other side, brush the luster dust all over the surface and you can see how much smoother this side is. Once it's covered in dust I'm going to put on some gloves because this can get a little bit messy. The dust is very much on the chocolate however it can come off on your hand so I prefer using gloves for this. I can now take the mat away and bring over a chopping board because I'm going to start cutting this and I want to protect my surface. So this sheet is extremely thin and flexible and you could do all sorts of decorations with it but I love the effect that the bow has. What I have is a small craft knife and I'm going to start off by cutting two wide rectangular strips. It's really important that your knife is really sharp when you do this so whether you're using a craft knife or a sharp kitchen knife make sure it is sharp so you get smooth clean lines. Now to make the bow you're going to need some sort of glue. I have some leftover chocolate and gelatin in that original bowl that I was putting in the microwave so I'm going to pop it in there for another 10 seconds and it's going to loosen up and this can act as my glue. I'm going to brush a bit of the melted chocolate in the middle of this strip and then fold over each edge so it meets in the middle. So you can see where we're going with this, when you squeeze the middle back the other way it starts to form a bow shape but we need that extra small piece of ribbon to go around the middle to hold it in place. I'm going to cut out two smaller strips that are quite thin because they need to go around the center of the bow. So because my chocolate gelatin keeps setting I have to keep putting it back in the microwave to make it loose again so I can use as glue. So I've cut a small strip from the gelatin sheet, much thinner this time, brush a little bit of the melted chocolate around the middle and place the smaller strip around the middle of the bow to hold it in place and there you have a very Disney looking princess bow. Once again making sure that you have that fold in the bow before you add the extra chocolate gelatin. It's really nice when you get the fold in there too and now I'm going to cut the tails of the ribbon. So for this I want to cut longer thinner strips again using the craft knife and I'm going to show two different versions, a couple slightly longer and two of them shorter and at the end of these strips I'm going to cut a v-shape to make it look like a traditional ribbon. The shorter ones look nice staying flat but the longer ones have enough space so you can manipulate them especially if they're drooping down a cake for example. If you've seen my Valentine's Day cake already you saw that I put the tails of the ribbons drooping down the second tier of the cake which looked really effective and it stuck to the butter cream. If you wanted to secure the ribbon tails to the actual bow then you can always use the melted chocolate gelatin again and it really is that simple. It's probably the most simple yet effective decoration that I've come across and I absolutely love it. I'm sure you'll be seeing more of these on my cakes so if you haven't already check out my Valentine's Day cake tutorial where I put this bow on the cake directly and of course my whole channel is full of recipes and tutorials. I hope you enjoyed this and looking forward to seeing your chocolate gelatin bows. Don't forget to tag me at George's Cakes and we'll see you soon with more tutorials!