Fake Quiche

For the upcoming production of Five Lesbians Eating a Quiche, I needed quiche (obviously), a LOT of it. 

I started picking up pie plates at thrift stores as soon as I agreed to do the show. Within the show itself I needed about a dozen quiches, but the company also was very interested in having lots of quiche in the lobby as the audience is entering. 

It was decided I would aim for 50 quiches, so I set to work. 

I mixed up salt dough for the crusts. To save a bit of mess (as the flour tends to get everywhere) I mixed the dough in the sink. 

Then I pressed the dough into the pie pans. For clear glass dishes I had to make a full crust, but for the metal or ceramic dishes I could get away with just doing the sides. 

 To bake the crusts I preheated the oven to 400 degrees, put in the pans, then turned off the oven and left the pies in there for the rest of the day. This didn't all happen in one day, by the way. I made crusts every morning for a few days, then cycled through the steps as each quiche was ready. 

 Once the crusts were baked, I filled them with great-stuff expanding foam. 

 After the foam hardened and cured, I carved off anything that had expanded above the top of the crust

 I learned as I went that it works best to have an uneven surface on top, with all of the foam stopping about a quarter inch lower than the top of the crust. 

 My plan was to melt down wax, add yellow dye and pour it on top to finish the quiches. My first attempts didn't turn out as planed though. They looked too yellow, and the wax was too translucent. I ended up buying opaque taper candles from the dollar store to mix in with my bulk craft wax in order to get the opacity correct. 

 Wax can be tricky to judge because, when it melts, it is all transparent. It is hard to know what the color will look like once everything hardens and become whiter and more opaque. 

 After everything was melted down, I poured the wax over the great stuff, and then left it to cool. 

 Here are the same two quiches after the wax cooled. 

 The color is close to right, but the texture is all wrong. 

 Since the color was right I decided to start experimenting with fillings. I collected spare bits of past projects from my craft closet and set to work. 

 The first try was with these multi-colored pom-pom balls. I spread them over the foam, 

Then poured the wax on top. 

Once the wax cured, it looked like this. Better than the plain ones, but the texture was still not right, and it was too obvious what the pom-poms were. 

I ended up spooning a bit more hot wax onto the top of the quiche. I then strategically pressed it, piled it and moved it with my spoon until it dried, leaving a much more convincing texture, and obscuring the obvious shape of the pom-poms. 

 I tried again with bits of red pipe cleaner

 leftover fake leaves

 and rice- not my favorite

 And here are some of the results.

This is my first batch of 16, so I'm sure as I go forward they will get even better, and hopefully I'll find other filling options that give more interesting variety to the collection (I'm definitely want to try sprinkling the tops of some with real herbs while the wax is still hot).