I have a helmet cake due in 2 days and nothing is working out! I made the face mask from gum paste last week, in advance so it could dry. Unfortunately while painting it I broke off part of it. And I'm such a novice that I painted with straight gel food coloring - I was tired and I wanted to make sure it came out with a nice black color.

Except now I have a broken and still sticky wet face mask that I painted two days ago.

My question is how do I get this to dry? Do I need to wipe it down as carefully as possible (to avoid more breaking)? Stick it in the oven?

And on the breakage - there really isn't time to make another, can gum paste glue restick the broken part or should I just jump to a non-edible glue, as nobody will be eating the face mask?

I'm feeling like such a newbie on this cake. I've done stacked cakes but this is my first shaped cake, and so far it's not going well... any help and thoughts are welcome!!!

i did a pair of high heeled shoes that broke on delivery (luckily just to my parents for my moms b-day) so she suggested that i use a very stiff royal icing and glue the shoe strap back on then stick it in the oven on the lowest setting for a couple hours. this did work, helped dry out the colors that i painted as well (they were also sticky), but i've since repaired breakage to gumpaste by finding a coresponding choc wafers and melted them, piped them on the break and then smoothed out. but-one thing to remember, choc does not take the color well afterwards, so either mend with choc from the back side where nobody will see or be very careful, cause it takes multiple coats to cover with paint. hth.

Awesome! Thank you for the advice, I will try glueing it back together tonight, and then pray that it doesn't got messed up in transport (this is the part that is REALLY making me nervous, as it is to a location where I can't do a whole lot to fix it)