Mother's Day and an Attempt at Fondant

So, I decided it was about time for me to attempt to cover a cake in fondant. I made the cake. I got the fondant. I watched the videos on YouTube. I learned that those ladies make this look a lot easier than it really is. How do they make it so smooth? How are they not left with excess fondant which folds over and makes unsightly little creases? Why does their fondant simply blend back into itself to create a superbly uniform covering? I hope to some day know the answers to these questions, but for now, this is what I got:
Aside from the slight tear in the back (that I cleverly hid from view and which you would never have known about had I not just told you), I suppose it's not bad for my first try. But here's the cool thing: all you have to do is cover your imperfect fondant in lots of frosting squiggles, and no one will be the wiser!

TA-DA!! Yes, I know, isn't it lovely? But wait, there's more! A quick trip to the back yard...

...and you have a beautiful cake topper! Quite nice, no?

Anyway, moving on now! I know Mother's Day was a while ago, but I'm obviously a little behind in my blogging. My mom's favorite cupcake of mine is the chocolate salted caramel, so I adapted that into a cake. I don't have any pics of the scrummy inside, but it was three layers of chocolate cake with caramel sauce and delicious salted caramel frosting between each layer. The whole thing is covered in whipped ganache, and I made some fondant calla lilies for the first time :)

And here's a close-up of the flowers, which I am including mostly because I think it's a nice shot of my little bow. I was very proud of my little bow. This pic is slightly fuzzy, but you can make out the tiny pleats. So cute :)

That's all for now, folks, but I have a bazillion sugar cookies to share, and I will be back with them very, very soon, most likely later tonight :)

Babies! And Late Rabbits :)

So over the weekend I made some cupcakes for a baby shower. Twins!

Aren't the babies cute all wrapped up in their little blankies? Yes, yes they are.

Awwww, tiny gumpaste babies! So sweet :)

So anyway.... there were alphabet blocks which, btw, take kind of a long time to make. In case you're thinking of making some.

Some cute little stamped plaques. Since she's having one of each, some of the cupcakes said both "It's a boy!" and "It's a girl!" The rest just said BABY and had cute ponies.

So many babies! Aaaaaaaaahhhh! (I'm not quite sure why all my pics look so fuzzy today. Sorry 'bout that.)

And here they are all together again :) These were funfetti cake with vanilla buttercream. Rather, they were supposed to be funfetti cake...but the cake store was out of jimmies, so I attempted to make funfetti using colored sugar instead. This does not work. FYI.

I had another order over the weekend for some White Rabbit cupcakes. You know, the one from Alice in Wonderland who is running terribly late for a very important date. These are lemon cupcakes frosted with white chocolate buttercream.

I chose the animated Disney White Rabbit because I like Disney, and also because he was the simplest to copy ;)

Here he is, poor guy! He's late, he's late!

I painted the pocket watches with gold luster dust...I hadn't used luster dust very much before, but this was pretty simple, and I think it turned out well :)

Happy Birthday Joey!

Flowers and Flutterbies

I had the opportunity to make some cupcakes last weekend for a friend's twin daughters' birthday party. We went with pink and lime green butterflies and flowers :) I was super excited to make cute, girly cupcakes, and I was very happy with the way these turned out!

The cupcakes are half vanilla filled with strawberries and half chocolate, all frosted with vanilla buttercream. The butterflies have some sparkle to them, as do the flowers, but it doesn't show up well in the pictures. On some pics you can see a hint of shimmer in certain places...

Each girl had her own special cupcake :) Happy first birthday Ella and Milana!

Packaged up and ready to go!

Wait--these look familiar! The next week, my best friend placed an order for more flower and butterfly cupcakes, but this time in pink and purple.

Here they are in my awesome purple cupcake stand! I think it works perfectly with these cupcakes :)

Happy spring everyone!!

Sugar Cookies!

Sugar cookies are so fun! Pretty decorated sugar cookies are fairly easy to make, but the process is rather time-consuming. But I think it's worth it, because you can make such darn cute cookies! Cookies are a lot of fun because there is an almost endless variety of shapes you can make, and then of course you can decorate them however you please. Fun fun! So to begin, you need some sugar cookies (of course) and some royal icing. I have tried a fair few different sugar cookie recipes. My favorite is this recipe from bakeat350.blogspot.com. If you are interested in sugar cookies, I would definitely advise you to browse around that website. She makes some really, really awesome cookies, and always has great decorating tutorials. Okay, so, that other thing you need: royal icing. Royal icing is powdered sugar, meringue powder (or egg whites), and water. You will need two consistencies of icing: stiff, for outlining and decorations; and thin, for flooding. So here are my supplies, all ready to make cookies! You don't want your stiff icing too stiff or it will be difficult to pipe, but it needs to be stiff enough that it will hold its shape to make a good outline. I suggest some trial and error to decide which consistency works best for you. Then add some water to thin out your icing. When you dip a spoon into the icing, you want it to run right off and blend back in with the icing in the bowl within a second or so. For this thinned icing, I highly recommend getting some squeeze bottles. Cookie decorating will be so much easier. First thing you gotta do is pipe on your outlines using your stiff frosting. If you will be outlining one cookie in multiple colors, like the ones on top, wait for one color to dry before piping on another to prevent them from blending together. Now you wait for all your outlines to dry. I have moved on to flooding sooner than I ought to have before without any disastrous consequences, but you really should wait at least a few hours. Once your outlines are dry, the next step is to flood the cookie with your thinned out icing. You basically want to pour a bunch of icing into the middle of the cookie. Squeeze bottles are very nice for this because they're not messy, and because you can easily get icing into smaller areas. You want to put on enough icing to almost entirely cover the cookie. Just make sure you don't have too much or it will flow over your outlines and make a mess.

The next step isn't much fun. Take a toothpick and spread the frosting right out to the edges and into the corners. You can flood a few cookies at a time before going back and spreading the icing out, but be cautious not to wait too long or your icing will already have started to dry and it won't look very nice at all when you try to spread it. Now you have to wait for this to dry. Royal icing does dry fairly quickly, as I said, but you really want to make sure it is completely dry before you move on to decorating. Again, wait at least a few hours, or even overnight.

The last step is decorating! Use your stiff icing again to pipe on decorations :)

Again, wait a while to be sure your icing is completely dry before you try to package or transport the cookies.

Now the best part: lots of pictures of cookies! I haven't made a ton of sugar cookies yet, but here is what I have done :) (Go check out bakeat350.blogspot.com to see some more awesome sugar cookies!!)

Little jack-in-the-box dudes :)

Alphabet blocks! Prizes to anyone who can figure out what all my pictures are supposed to be haha ;)

And adorable little onesies :) The above cookies were all for a baby shower. I suggested onesies to the mom, but she didn't want anything too "baby" or cutesy, so she suggested ties on them. They came out super cute, and I also made some with little bowties and buttons and a cute little pocket. See why sugar cookies are so fun?

Here are all the baby shower cookies packed up and ready to go. Sugar cookies look great in little cellophane bags tied with a simple ribbon. It's a good, simple way to prepare them as favors :)

Wedding cake

Pretty ornaments and Christmas trees....

...see how nice they can look? What a beautiful (and tasty) place marker!

My husband and I recently bought our first home, so I made these to thank our realtor and our mortgage broker. The lines are a little rough, but I think they came out pretty cute overall.

And finally, some poinsettias for Christmas!

Thanks for stopping by! See ya next time! ;)

Catching Up: Christmas

I just love Christmas! It is absolutely my favorite holiday :) I love the lights on the houses, the smell of Christmas trees, the good spirit of the season...and of course, all the Christmas goodies!
The Santa and his reindeer cupcakes are eggnog cake with eggnog frosting, and the decorations are made of royal icing. To make royal icing decorations like these, create your decorations on a piece of wax paper in the same way you would frost a cookie with royal icing (if you don't know how to do that, wait for my upcoming post about sugar cookies!), let them dry completely, then carefully pick them up with a spatula and transfer them to your cupcakes.
To make eggnog cake, I used my favorite vanilla cupcake recipe and just substituted the milk for eggnog. The cake had a decent noggy flavor, but using eggnog instead of milk made the cake much more dense. For the frosting, I decided on a cooked flour buttercream because that type of frosting uses a lot of milk. (If you'd like more info about cooked flour buttercream, I suggest Pioneer Woman's tutorial on the subject.) The frosting didn't seem to like the substitution and had a bit of a strange texture, but the taste was spot-on. I don't think I can get such a strong noggy flavor with another type of frosting. Next year I will have to experiment some more, though, and see if I can create a frosting with a similarly great flavor, but that is more pipe-able. I also made some alcoholic frosting, and of course that just made it worse--consistency-wise only of course! ;)

I also made some gingerbread latte cupcakes using this recipe from Cupcake Project.
The only difference in my cupcakes is that I only made coffee frosting, no gingerbread frosting. These cupcakes were delicious!!! I love, love, love gingerbread, and the coffee frosting was simply phenomenal. They were a great dessert, but if you're going to eat cupcakes for breakfast (and you know you want to), this one would be a great start-of-the-day cupcake. I topped them with mini gingerbread man sprinkles from my local cake supply shop.

Next up: Chocolate peppermint cupcakes!

I was originally planning on making these with a bit fancier decorations, but I think the simple crushed candy cane border actually came out looking very nice. These are chocolate cake filled with peppermint whipped cream, topped with peppermint ganache and crushed candy cane. For the whipped cream, I made a stabilized whipped cream (basically, adding gelatin to the cream) and folded in some candy cane powder. I wasn't getting a strong enough peppermint flavor with just the candy cane, though, so I also added some peppermint extract. I still didn't think the peppermint aspect of these chocolate-peppermint cupcakes was strong enough, so I also added a teensy bit of peppermint extract to the ganache. Mmmmm :)

For candy cane powder, simply crush your candy canes in a food processor. Pour the crushed canes through a mesh strainer, then use the powder to flavor (and color) the whipped cream, and use the bigger pieces to roll the edges of the frosted cupcake in.

The last Christmas cupcakes I made were classic red velvet with cream cheese frosting.

As you can see, I decorated them with wreaths and poinsettias. It's a bit harder to pipe decorations with cream cheese frosting than with buttercream, since cream cheese doesn't get as stiff, but they came out very cute :)

I'm already excited for Christmas this year and am thinking of which cupcakes I can make, and how I can decorate them!

Catching Up: Halloween

I went to Disneyland for Halloween--well, not actually on Halloween, a week before. But Disneyland has awesome Halloween parties. As you can see (I hope), my friends and I dressed up as characters from Peter Pan. I'm Wendy, in the middle there. I would like to add that I made my costume myself and, as it's the first dress I've ever sewn completely independently, I'm quite proud of it! It was a ton of fun, as usual ;) My favorite part of Disney's Halloween parties is seeing everyone else's costumes. There were some really great ones :)

Oh, and I made some Halloween cupcakes!

These spooky spiders are pumpkin cake with yummy chocolate frosting. I actually made these last year as cookies. Delicious either way! The idea here is from Bakerella. If you've never been to her website, I highly suggest you check it out! www.bakerella.com

The jack-o-lanterns are opposite of the spiders: chocolate cake with pumpkin frosting!

And finally, some red velvet eerie eyeballs! I was a little less than pleased with these, but overall I guess they're okay.

Happy (very, very late) Halloween!

I'm back, and I have cute animals!

I have internet again! Well, okay, I've had internet again for a couple weeks. The hubs and I recently bought our first house, and we're slowly getting moved in. Annnnnnd....no more slow satellite internet! Hooray! I'll be back after Christmas with a post or two recapping what I've been up to since October, but for now, here are some farm animal cupcakes I made last night :) I've actually been wanting to try making farm animals for a long time now, so I was super happy when a friend ordered these! I hope she liked them ;)

So, what did old MacDonald have on his farm? Cows, of course...
And pigs...
And sheep! BAAAAA.
I love the little sheepies. I think they look like the guys from Wallace and Gromit :)

Here they are, living happily together until the time comes for them to be eaten, like any good farm animals. Except these ones are way yummier because they're made of chocolate and vanilla buttercream. Mmmmmmm.

But wait--MacDonald is raising turtles too! So I know turtles aren't exactly a farm animal, but I made these lil guys for a birthday a few weeks ago and they are four-legged critters, so I thought I may as well tack them on to this post. They were super simple, but I think they came out really cute!

The cuppies are vanilla with chocolate frosting, and the turtles are made from fondant with candy melt shells :)

I might pop back in quickly before Christmas, but I might not, so Merry Christmas! I hope you all have a wonderful holiday :)