Okay. This cookout is 3 days away, and I’m still experimenting with my desserts. Here’s what we learned today:

My food coloring works. I finally got a nice navy blue color, and I also managed a nice aqua (which isn’t pictured here, just my stages of blue).

I made little cakes with my snazzy new square shaped silicone pans that I found at AC Moore over the weekend. ButI don’t like the yellow cake I made. I used pastry flour (the recipe called for cake flour), but it made the cake really grainy. It was more like cornbread than yellow cake. But the pans work!

My whole enrobed with icing plan officially doesn’t work. It’s not thick enough, and if I make it any thicker I will OD on the sugar. This was apparently a fondant recipe, but it seems more like royal icing. I’m clearly no baking expert, but I thought there was a difference. I knew this wouldn’t be thick sheets like those molded onto cake, but I thought it would be thick and velvety, and I thought it would pour and cover nicely. It didn’t really work. So I will be melting white chocolate and coloring that instead. That’s the next experiment.