I dip and roll my cakes, but they already have a perfect water content.
The idea of letting the cake sit allows the excess moisture on the cake to leach outward into the verm helping it to form a cohesive mass. Letting it sit even longer also allows the myc to begin colonizing said verm, again helping to develop the cohesion.
With that being said the way I always like to do it is after I have gotten a nice thick coating of vermiculite all over my cakes and they have been placed lovingly in their chamber I then get my plate or pan or whatever it was I rolled the cakes on.
[I'm going to stop here and backtrack the process to explain that when you roll a wet cake in dry verm you get way more verm to stick to the cake than any other way that I know of, also it is a one shot kind of deal meaning that you only roll the surface once, any more going back and rolling trying to get more verm to stick will only get verm to fall off. As well if your verm in the pan your rolling on becomes moist then it won't adhere near as well as if it were bone dry, so I continue to replenish the dry verm as I go, this creates a good amount of moist verm around the edges of your verm pile especially if you're doing a lot of cakes]
The way I do it is to hold one finger on each end of the cake and make a single roll thru the dry verm pile, then gently put my fingers on the rolled edges and stamp each end gently but firmly onto the dry verm pile and then gently set on piece of foil in chamber. This gives a very thick coating of vermiculite on the cakes, but this coating is easily disturbed when fresh, hence the repeated use of terms like lovingly and gently. Now I take my rolling tray with all of the leftover moist verm on it and if it's not moist enough I go ahead and wet it down, then I grab a pinch of the wet verm and very gently put it on top of the cake being as careful as I can not to disturb anything, this takes a steady hand and can be quite tedious but is a necessary part of the process. Continue until all cakes have an extra wet pile on top.
OK so we got our cakes phreshly and phatly coated. Time to take a break and smoke a bowl maybe get a little something to eat, hell maybe even knock off a slice of pie if the old lady is in the mood, watch TV , play a video game, whatever. The point here is to get refreshed because the next part takes a fair amount of concentration and energy, so you want to feel fresh.
Ok, so I have a big pump sprayer that I use for misting when I have a lot of misting to do but I don't use it for this part of the process because it is way too powerful. What I do is to take a spray bottle and hold the nozzle about a half inch from the top of the cake and give it a gentle squeeze. This soaks down the verm and you can see the verm on the sides of the cake change color as well as readjust slightly as it becomes moist. Pull the trigger very slowly because too fast will certainly splash your verm everywhere, I've tried droppers, turkey basters and other things, nothing else gives you control over the water flow like a spray bottle so that's my standard tool for this. Go from cake to cake, refilling your bottle often because whenever it gets half empty it stops working because of the angle you're holding it at.
If you check out the cakes in my gallery you will see a monster top layer of vermiculite on them. Want a big flush? Got to get water to your substrate!
-------------------- KRAMER CAKES


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