The idea was to topped the cuppies with the Chinese character of Xi or Double Happiness. Initially, I had thought it would be just a simple matter of rolling out the paste and then cutting out the shapes with the Xi character vegetable cutter. How wrong was I! The paste stuck so badly to the cutter that there was no way to remove it without tearing it apart or distorting it's shape in the process. I tried dusting the cutter with cornflour and icing sugar. I even used a very fine artist brush to give the cutting edge a very thin coating of shortening. All to no avail as the sugarpaste just refused to bulge from the cutter. In the end, I had to lightly press the cutter on the sugarpaste to get an imprint and then cut out the shape manually with a penknife.
This laborious process took me from 11am till 7.30pm and I only managed 16 Xi characters in the end. Boy! Was I tried after that.
After an hour's rest, I decided to make flipflops out of the balance sugarpaste. This is much easier and I managed quite a few pairs of flipflops within the hour.
