These are two more of the numerous sweets sold at the real Pasticceria Penso. Palline di cioccolato are chocolate balls covered in sprinkles. My friend at the bakery, Antonello, explained to me that in Trieste the filling is based on the Austrian cake called “punschtorte,” made from a mixture of crumbled sponge cake, cocoa, raisins, hazelnuts, sugar, lemon zest, vanilla, and rum. My polymer clay palline di cioccolato are simply balls of Premo burnt umber clay covered in sprinkles left over from a previous project.
Curabiè are crescent-shaped almond cookies of Greek origin. These took a bit more work. I spent some time in advance making test chips of different combinations of clay, to come up with the best dough color for the project. I ended up using a mix of Fimo vanilla, Premo ecru, white, and translucent. I formed the crescent, gave it texture with a toothbrush, and lightly shaded the bottoms and edges with soft pastels for a golden-brown baked effect. After baking, I sealed in the pastels with Helmar Crystal Kote Matte spray varnish.
I glued some of each to this plastic tray for display in the case, as shown in the photos below.
In addition, I’d bought a bunch of clear plastic containers to display some of the items on shelves. To give the containers a more finished look, I lined the bottoms with gold circles, which I cut out from gold vinyl on card stock using my Cricut cutting machine.
I also attached some 1/16″ burgundy ribbon. I didn’t really think this part through very well in advance, however, and it turned out to be more of a problem than I anticipated. It did occur to me that the overlapping ribbon on the bottom might make them difficult to stack, which is why I was careful in the placement of the ribbon. You can see that the container on the left in the photo below has no more than two layers of ribbon overlapping in the center. However, this was still too thick, and the containers were quite wobbly when stacked. I brainstormed several solutions, and it was the simplest, most obvious one that worked. As shown in the container on the right, I merely cut out the overlapping crosspiece, and glued the ends down in their place. Now they stack beautifully!
I also used the Cricut machine to make tiny oval stickers. Since the gold vinyl adhesive can’t go through my printer, I didn’t know how else to make a label that said “Penso” other than handwriting it with a Sharpie. (I did try a pen with a finer tip than Sharpie’s Ultra Fine Point, but it wasn’t alcohol-based and completely smeared off with a touch of my finger.)
Here they are stacked on the bakery shelves.
