Elmo Birthday Cake

I wanted to make a birthday cake for my niece's 2nd birthday and her mom told me that she's into Elmo and Barney.  I'm not very partial to Barney so I decided to make an Elmo cake.  Her mom also wanted to stay away from too much food coloring so the cake is carrot cake with buttercream frosting; I also made and placed the decorations in a way so they could be easily taken off.  Since my niece is turning 2 and won't be a baby much longer, I made a "baby Elmo" cake topper.

Instead of rimming the bottom of the cake completely with fondant, I sporadically grouped fondant balls (so they can be easily taken off).

Right view:

Left view: 

Aerial view:  The letters were cut out of a mixture of fondant and gum paste and I surrounded each letter with sugar confetti (I put them on one at a time with tweezers).  I thought the mosaic effect of the confetti was pretty cool!

Sesame Street sign: I used yellow sprinkles to create the sign's border.

One more picture:

 HAPPY BIRTHDAY ADDY!!!

Brave Cake Truffles

These "Brave" cake truffles from the Scotland Highlands were for a 9-yr old's family birthday party.  Her mom basically asked me to create something for her daughter and mentioned that her daughter really wanted to see "Brave" for her birthday.  I wavered between making "Brave" cake pops or cake truffles, but due to the design, I settled on cake truffles.

The design of the two dozen "Brave" cake truffles include Melinda, a target & arrow, Eleanor's crown, three bears, and gold leaves with yellow pearls.  The butter and chocolate cake truffles were first covered with blue candy melt and then covered with a piece of blue fondant to achieve a smooth finish.  All of the decorations were hand-molded from fondant with the exception of the leaves and flowers; I used a cutter.

Close ups:

Aerial view:

Packaged and ready to go!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!

Perry the Platypus Cake Truffles

These Perry the Platypus cake balls were made to celebrate the launch of Disney's "Agent P Strikes Back" online game.  As part of my research for this project, I ended up playing several minutes of the game which included collecting coins in the shape of platypus feet and battling robots; it's quite a cute game!

Here's a link to the game:  http://disney.com/agentp
This URL also works on mobile Safari/Chrome browsers too!

Blue and yellow candy melt were mixed to match Perry's turquoise color.  I came up with using a little star-shaped fondant cutter for the feet and a Rolo candy on top of a circle of fondant for the detective hat.  I mixed my own orange and brown fondant since I usually only have a few colors on hand (primary colors, white, and black).  The hats were allowed to dry overnight before I attached them to Perry's head with a dab of candy melt.

I sometimes delay putting eyes on my creations due to the discomfort factor of having so many pairs of eyes staring at me...it's a bit disarming.  Makes you wonder what the guy in the lower left-hand corner is looking at.

This brigade of partially finished Agent P's made me a little nervous when I went to bed around midnight; I kept wondering what mischief they might be up to downstairs.

Perry's tails were hand-molded and detailed.  All the vanilla Perry's have straight tails and all the chocolate Perry's have slanted tails.  For the final detail, each detective hat was rimmed with black "ribbon" making Perry an official cake agent.

Aerial view for Agent P's different expressions:

Agent P's packaged and ready for their next assignment: 

Estimated time for this mission: 7 hours.

For the Perry fans out there, there's also Disney's iPad/phone app puzzler game called "Where's My Perry?" modeled after "Where's My Water?"  It's Disney's number one phone app right now, and I downloaded it this morning and it's really fun!

CONGRATS TO THE DISNEY TEAM THAT WORKED SO HARD ON THIS PROJECT!!

Custom Dog Cake Pops

A friend asked me to make cake pops of their two dogs for her husband's birthday; six cake pops of Alfie and six of Juno.  They are all chocolate cake on the inside.

Here are the real Alfie and Juno:

Both dogs had amber irises, so I gave the cake pop version of Alfie and Juno amber irises too.  You can see the color better in Alfie's picture below.  For Alfie's scruffy look, I meticulously dipped a toothpick into the candy melt and added "fur" strand by strand.  I even made sure to copy the direction that Alfie's fur grew!

I also made nostrils for all their noses so they could smell better:

 Here they are packed and ready to go!  When my friend came to pick them up, she said that the cake pop Alfie has the same expression as the real Alfie.  I hope they enjoy the cake pops, but I'm wondering if it'll be hard to take that first bite!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DARREN!

The Nightmare Before Christmas...

" 'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house.  Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse..." and so begins the legendary poem by Clement C. Moore.

This event was for a surprise birthday party (shhhh...it's this Friday) and since the birthday guy's favorite holiday happens to be Halloween, I used "The Nightmare Before Christmas" as the theme.  I was asked to combine the birthday theme with Christmas, and since I've always loved the characters in "The Nightmare Before Christmas", I was super excited to begin this project.

A couple weeks before the event, I begin researching ideas and envisioning what I wanted the cake to look like and eventually drew this picture.  As you can see from the photo above, I actually stuck pretty close to my original design (which doesn't always happen)!

Because I wanted to focus on decorating, I outsourced the 6" velvet cake from one of my favorite bakeries and asked them to simply cover it with buttercream.  At home, I cut multi-width strips of black, red, and green fondant and laid them aside to dry out a bit.  This is actually a bit more complicated and time-consuming than it looks.

Meanwhile, I cut a building silhouette out of sugar paper which was no small feat (for so many nooks and crannies) since sugar paper breaks easily.  After placing the colored strips where I wanted, I adhered the silhouette to the side of the cake with frosting and made some windows out of fondant.

Next, I rolled black and white fondant pearls and lined the base of the cake:

Now it was time for Jack, who was an architectural challenge (skinny legs, arms, hat, and tricky beard).  The arms were still too flimsy after several hours so I set Jack aside while I worked on the iconic moon and hill.  His arms ended up drying overnight and then almost for another day.

Here is armless Jack (his arms are behind his body):

Next in line to make were the pumpkins, which I nestled on top of curled holly leaves.  I also decided to make a couple of snowflakes for the side of the cake.

Here is the whole cake assembly, minus Jack...still waiting for Jack.....

 Left view & right view:

And finally...Jack!

Again, left view & right view:

More close ups:

Time to make some cake pops.  I already had the Santa Claus bellies from the previous post, so I made some Jack cake pops and created a design on yellow cake pops to complement the moon and the hill motif.

All the Jack's have different faces:

And voila!  Here is the whole display:

Aerial view:

Almost everything looked great to me when I retired upstairs for the night, but one little thing kept bugging me: the back of the moon.  I had covered it in candy melt so it would stand up, but I didn't like the look of it (see below).  Cakes are meant to be seen from 360 degrees, and I cringed at the thought of someone seeing the back of the moon, so I slept on it...

My solution the next morning were two more pieces of fondant on the back of the moon:

Packaging the cake pops for delivery:

This project was super fun but also challenging.  Estimation of total hours: 12 hrs.  But then again, there's the saying, "when you do what you love," it doesn't feel like work...I love doing this!!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY AUSTIN,

and I hope you enjoy your cake and cake pops!  I've been requested not to post this up on Facebook until Friday night!  :)

Here's one more picture!

Merry Christmas Everyone!!!