Spray Painted Turkeys and Brick Brownies

Hey, Propsters, I wanted to pass along this link that just came across the SPAM net.  The fine folks at Deli Garage are making an edible spray paint. Shipping to the US is still a bit up in the air, but the site promises tasteless metallic paints for all of your food gilding needs.  Silver steak? Sure! Gilded Goose? Why not?  While you're over there, take a look at their blog. I think you'll like the brick shaped brownies (for wall building) and some of the other clever vittles these guys have on offer.

Oh, and is the website only coming up in German? Up in the right hand corner is a little button marked ENG. Just click it.

Happy Propping, dears.

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Mr. Laurel's Meat Pies

In this season's production of 'Laurel and Hardy,' Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy had to chow down on a plate of meat pies. Well, if your goal is to ask your actor to eat something greasy, crumbly, messy, and high calorie every night, then a meat pie is right up your alley! Your actor can pack on the pounds and your wardrobe staff can start scraping grease. Now, if you don't want your poor performers and costumers to hate the meat pie bit, you can always sub in these delightful meat free pies.  This is one of my shortest posts ever, because these pies are really, really easy to make. Here we go:

Step 1) Buy some of that pastry dough in a tube.
Step 2) Make it into pie shapes.
Step 3) Bake it. (Bake it at the recommended temperature until it looks golden brown.)

Ta-da!  We opted to make a massive batch during tech, freeze them, and re-thaw them a few at a time- and it seemed to work beautifully. I won't claim that the calories issue was completely solved, but it sure beat a pocket of ground beef every night. Also, our savvy director blocked the scene so that only two of the pies were eaten each night. These two edible pies sat atop a towering pyramid of foam meat pies, so the joke still had its punch.

That's it! There you go! Meatless Meat pies! Easy as.....yup, pie.

Happy Propping!

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Serve Something Spectacular

This weekend, I was shopping with a friend, and we stopped into a local thrift store.  While surveying the offerings, a stack of magazines caught my eye, and I was immediately shoveling handfuls of old cooking serials into my arms.  I would have guessed that these magazines were from the 60's or 70's, but I suppose I'm not a good guesser of period food styles yet.  These phenomenal booklets were published in 1985, and offer photographic evidence of some pretty ridiculous and unbelievable dishes.  While it's true that these dishes are not fake food, but real recipes, it's hard to believe that some of them could ever exist.  I'm going to share some of these photos with you today, I hope that you enjoy them as much as I do.

Note: Please note the foods that are 'Gelee' or covered in Aspic.  Aspic is a savory gelatin glaze; think meat flavored jello.

Breast of Turkey and Sliced Tongue in Aspic and Pate-Stuffed Chicken Breasts en Gelee.  Yum!

Poached Fish with Cucumber Scales

Turkey Breast Galantine

Pear Feuilletes with Caramel

Roast of Beef en Gelee

Vanilla-Ice-Cream Bombe Surprise (The surprise is grapes, apricot jam, and kirsch)

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Canapes ala JT

Hey afauxcionados, welcome to this week's blog. This week, we have a special guest contributor. My friend JT is a propster in Texas, and has some lovely canapes to share with us. I'll just let JT take it from here:

For a recent production of 'Much Ado About Nothing', the director requested a tray of simple canapes. I decided to go with a cheese spread on bread garnished with vegetables. Some were fake and some were consumed.

For the project you will need:
- Bread (I bought Pepperidge Farms pre-sliced stuff)
- Cheese spread
- Matte Acrylic spray
- White Acrylic caulk
- Tint (yellow ochre for this particular cheese)
- Oregano

I wanted to seal the bread that was not going to be eaten, so I let it dry out over night then sprayed it with four coats, or so, of matte acrylic spray. As a warning, the bread did shrink and warp a little when it dried so it’s probably not a good idea for close distances.

Next, I spread some cheese on two pieces of bread and enjoyed a snack while analyzing the cheese for color and texture.

I put some caulk in an appropriate mixing container and added just a little bit of the yellow ochre tint. I guess it was my lucky day because I was able to match the color without adding too much tint.

To simulate the herbs in the cheese spread I liberally added some dried oregano to the gourmet caulk mix. The oregano helped with texture, but was not visible as herbs in the cheese. So, after spreading some caulk mixture onto the bread I sprinkled more oregano on top and mixed it just enough to lightly coat the oregano in caulk but so the green color still showed. After the caulk cured I sprayed a little bit of satin acrylic spray over it to give it a little gloss.

 The (almost) end result was:

Left to right, the first 2 pieces of bread are real cheese and the third is caulk. For the show all of the canapes were dressed with shreds of real carrots or cucumbers, which were (obviously) replaced each night on the fake canapes.

Anna again-

So, propsters, do you have a lovely food project that you would like featured on the blog? Send it on over to propsanna@gmail.com along with photos and an explanation of your process. If I like what you sent, I'll put it on the blog. Happy propping!

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Edible Flowers at The Skylight

Every so often, a script comes along in which the characters are chowing down on some non-edible item. Flowers are actually a fairly commonly eaten prop, believe it or not. I base this highly scientific conclusion on the fact that I've only been doing props for a few years, and this is not the first time this has come up. Now, in the case of flowers, there are a few options. The performer can fake the action, the performer can eat a real edible flower, or the props dept. can provide something edible that looks like the proper flower. Once, for an evening of opera scenes, the shop I was working in made a large Datura flower out of Fosshape, and substituted a piece of flour tortilla for one of the petals. When it was time for the performer to eat the deadly flower, she simply took a bite of the tortilla petal.

In The Skylight's current production of "A Day in Hollywood, A Night in the Ukraine" Harpo Marx (Ray Jivoff) eats a carnation. You know, like you do. The very talented ladies of The Skylight's prop shop offered Ray several options for his edible flower. Here is what Lisa Schlenker, Properties Manager, said about it:

" (The) performer preferred sugar to real carnations. This particular guy is rather infamous for his sheet cake addiction, so we were not surprised. (We used) vanilla fondant. Very user friendly. It has a modeling consistency sort of like warm fresh Apoxie Putty.The gum paste ended up being stickier and a pain to work with, and not as easy for the performer to bite and chew when it hardened, so we went with 100% fondant for all the flower parts. For the green petioles at the base of the flower, we just used food grade paste food coloring and mixed it into the white fondant."

Chase Stoeger, a performer in the production, made a short video about the flowers, which he has posted on YouTube. It is a fun little look at Ray sampling the edible carnations, and you get a peek into The Skylight's prop shop.
You can see the video here.

If you like what you see, please check out "A Day in Hollywood, A Night in the Ukraine" which is running at The Skylight for the rest of the week.

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