It’s been over two years since I made the sprinkles and nuts (shown in the above photo on the left) for the gelateria. But as time has passed, I’ve grown increasingly unhappy with them. I think the chocolate sprinkles are fine and have so far used them in two other projects (sachertorte and palline di cioccolato for my pasticceria), but I was never truly satisfied with the colored sprinkles or the nuts.
When I made the colored sprinkles the first time, I was making do with the polymer clay I already owned. Since I didn’t yet have a primary blue color in my stash, I used Fimo turquoise. For the pink, I used Sculpey III dusty rose, which is much lighter than I wanted (not to mention, extremely brittle). I did have several colors of yellow to choose from, but Premo zinc yellow ended up looking rather washed out once baked. In fact, the entire color mix appeared much too pastel and subdued for my liking.
I wanted the mix to be more vibrant and have been contemplating a redo for months, but I’d glued the canister lids down and was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to pry them off. Fortunately, the white glue I’d used wasn’t that strong, and they popped off quite easily. It took a couple of hours to sort through the sprinkles with a pair of tweezers and remove the pink, blue, and yellow ones.
To replace those colors, I made a new batch using Premo cobalt blue, cadmium yellow, and a mix of fuschia and blush for the pink. I also decided that I wanted the sprinkles cut a bit smaller, so I picked through the original batch and cut the larger ones in half.
As for the nuts, the original ones were a bit darker than I’d wanted them to be, having used a mix of Premo ecru and translucent. More recently, for my cioccolatini project, I made some chopped hazelnuts, for which I created a lighter color by adding some white clay to the ecru-translucent mix. On these, I used brown acrylic paint for shading, rather than soft pastels, which I think gives the new nuts a more realistic effect.
In addition, the original nuts had turned out chunkier than I’d envisioned. I attribute this to the fact that back then I was using only my reading glasses for miniature work. About a year ago, my husband got me a pair of magnifiers, which have made a huge difference in my ability to work in such a tiny scale. In this project, they allowed me to chop the nuts much more finely. Since I had made extra hazelnuts for use in future projects, I had plenty with which to replace the ones in the canister.
