Cake Pop Insanity!

Butterfly Sandwiches

2014-03-05T14:17:00.000-05:00

Spring is in the air (kind of, right?), and with spring come all sorts of springtime things... flowers, bees, and butterflies. I make my daughter's (now 6 years old) lunch for school every day. I try to keep her lunches interesting, but all she likes for lunch is the standard peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Awhile ago I bought some cookie cutters, and began cutting her daily PB & J's into shapes- stars, flowers, etc. She loved them, but I always thought they were kind of boring. I recently purchased a Wilton butterfly cutter, and after cutting my daughter's sandwich into a butterfly shape, I suddenly got the idea: if I could make a cookie into a cool butterfly, why couldn't I do the same for her sandwich? And a colorful Butterfly Sandwich was born.

This is so easy, you won't believe it. First, you'll need your cutters.

Shamrock, butterfly, snowflake, and heart cutters.

I like the Wilton cutters because they're really big and deep. Perfect for sandwiches. Next, you'll need some spray-on food coloring.

Wilton Color Mist. I need more blue!

Well, you didn't know that there was such a thing as spray on food coloring? Now you do. It'll change how you decorate food! Next you'll need some really big sprinkles. They're not mandatory, but they help as stencils when you spray your food with the color mist.

And you'll need some gel food coloring. This acts as paint. I like the thick consistency of gel food color. You could use the thinner kind of food coloring you find at the market, but I worry that it would make your bread a little mushy. Gel food coloring is very opaque, so you don't need a lot of it to get the detail you want.

And I can't live without WHITE edible food color. Didn't know they made white? Well, they do! Love this stuff. Make sure you have a few food safe paint brushes, and you're ready to go.

First, use your cutter to cut out your shape. If you don't have time to decorate, stop here, you're done.

Cut out your shape. Here I'm making a butterfly for my daughter, and a ninja star for my son.

The butterfly cutter looks like a butterfly when it's cut out. But a snowflake shape can be turned into a few different things. For my son, this was going to be a ninja star. Whaaaaaaaaa!!!!

All cut out and ready to decorate.

For these, I used Jumbo Daisy sprinkles as my stencils. You can really use anything as a stencil for the Color Mist.

I first sprayed gold on the sandwich, but it didn't show up well with the brown wheat bread. So I ditched the gold Color Mist and switched to pink.

When I was finished with the pink, I decided to spray the top off with gold to see what would happen. Result? A pale orange! I let it dry while I sprayed the snowflake/ninja star.

I put my stencil pieces in place before spraying.

Using the red Color Mist, I sprayed gently all over the sandwich until I had even opacity.

Here's the fully colored ninja star.

While the ninja star dried, I removed the sprinkles off of the butterfly. You can see where the uncolored areas are.

So now it's time to paint! Here I used some white food coloring on a plastic lid as my palette.

Get your brush well-saturated with your color. You want to dab on the color, not brush. If you brush on the bread, you'll get colored crumbs everywhere! Take your time, dab, dab, dab...

After I completed the center body, I outlined the wings. Dab on the color as you go.

Next to color in the spots. I used dark purple for my spots and outlines. You really don't have to use stencils at all, but if you don't want to worry about the colors on the spots bleeding or mixing with the base color of the wing, then stenciling is the way to go. It also helps give you a guideline as to where the spots should go when you're painting them in.

I wasn't really digging how the dark spots looked with the light wings/body, so I darkened up the wings and body a bit.

Finished! Now on to finishing the ninja star...

I removed the stencil pieces, and colored in some edges and detail with a bit of the dark purple color gel. It looks black to me. Then I filled in the spots, and....

It's a super-cool ninja star!

Here's what the final lunches ended up looking like.

Easy and fun! And so you can see some other color combinations, below are some other butterfly sandwiches I made for my daughter to take to school at lunch. Each one took me just a few extra minutes to make, and she loves them!

Purple with dark purple details. This is one of my favorites.

Green with white details. This would be great for St. Patrick's Day!

Red with dark purple details. This was done before I found the white food coloring in my stash. Still looks very cool!

Pink with white details.

I really want to try a blue/purple ombre butterfly. Still need to get some blue Color Mist! I used pink and yellow Color Mist in the photo below. I sprayed yellow all over first, then followed up with pink- which resulted in a lovely orange color. The dots were done with pink gel food color, and the dark lines were done with purple color gel.

Off to school this butterfly goes!

And you can do this with not just peanut butter and jelly. If you use tuna, or even lunch meat in your sandwiches, simply make your sandwich, then cut out your shape. The food colorings don't have any sort of sweet flavor to clash with a savory sandwich.

Hope you enjoyed my little bit of edible creativity for the day. Thanks for stopping by!

Planet Jupiter Cake (Spherical Concentric Layer cake)

2013-09-06T14:02:00.001-04:00

Well, leave it to a nail polish maker to challenge me to create something I've never made before- an edible planet! I was up for the challenge, and the result is what you're about to see below. Meet my very own Jupiter cake!

Now, this was not my idea. A fabulous independent nail polish maker- Mei-Lynn at My Ten Friends- tossed out a challenge: the first person who could replicate the Jupiter cake from www.cakecrumbs.me would earn a bottle of nail polish. And since I am a huge My Ten Friends fan, I had to try this! If you want to see all the recipes and detailed tutorial of the Jupiter cake, give www.cakecrumbs.me a visit. I made this cake over a few weeks time, freezing the layers as I went along. Time-wise and depending on your cake skills, this could take you at least a few days to create. Just take your time, and you can do this, too!

My kitchen: this is how it all began!

I had to make a few edits of my own to the process, so I'll tell you what I used in my creation. For the cake, I used three different sized hemisphere pans made by Fat Daddio. The smallest is 2.75 x 1.375 inches, the medium is 5 x 2.5 inches, and the large one is 8 x 4 inches. I recommend purchasing two of each pan if you're planning on completing a full planet cake. It took me a long time to complete all the layers because I only had one pan of each size. I also have two ovens, so if you have just one oven to work with, then you may not want this, though.

The center chocolate layer. This was the easiest one to make. So cute, too!

I used the recipes on the cakecrumbs site for the cake. However, if you plan on using the size of pans I did, you will need to make some changes:

Make one batch of the chocolate batter for the 2.75 x 1.375 inch pan. You will have lots of batter for lots of little hemispheres. Make extras. You may need them in case something runs amok with your layers. And if it doesn't, then you've got lots of little bite-sized chocolate cakes. Damn, they're yummy, too!
Make two batches of the almond cake batter (one batch for each half) for the 5 x 2.5 inch pan. Bake at 325 degrees for 70 minutes- check for doneness at 65 minutes. Use an oven thermometer!
Make four batches of the vanilla cake batter (in other words, two batches for each half) for the 8 x 4 inch pan. If you're using the 8 inch pan, you may even want to make 6 batches of the vanilla cake recipe (three batches for each half). I didn't feel like I had quite enough batter with four batches, and carving before the last phase of assembly would have been easier for me. Bake at 325 degrees for 80 minutes. Check for doneness at 70 minutes. Again, use an oven thermometer!

Blurry, but you can see the fully baked chocolate layer inside the almond batter. It's about to go inside the oven.

It is really important to grease/flour your pans well! I use Pam for Baking, and it so totally rocks.

Uh oh. This is what happens when you don't have any support under the hemisphere pan when baking. Lopsided center! Gah! Time to try again.

Make sure your baking hemispheres are completely level before putting them in the oven. If you don't, you'll end up with some serious spillage over one side while baking, and your center layers will move off center. Not fun.

Trying again, I had the idea of stabilizing the hemisphere pan with a silicone muffin pan. It worked!

Perfect.

When working with hemisphere pans, you will need to reduce your cooking temps and increase your cooking times. For my medium and large hemisphere pans, I dropped the temp to 325 for 70 minutes for the medium pan, and 80 minutes for the larger pan. You will need to test doneness with a wood skewer to ensure it is cooked all the way through.

Remember how I mentioned about greasing/flouring your pans well? Again, Pam for Baking is awesome, and my cake easily popped out of the pan.

I didn't think I had enough batter for this layer. I figured that I should try anyways!

Looks like a huge wave crashing along side a cliff!

I made sure this was level before putting into my oven, supporting it with a silicone brownie bite pan. Baked nicely!

Half on the left is complete, the right half needs to be baked into the bigger pan here.

Both finished now! I wrapped them up in plastic and foil, then stored them in the freezer until I could get to the last part- making fondant!

I make my own MMF- marshmallow fondant. Here's the recipe I use:

Ingredients

1 (16 ounce) package miniature marshmallows

4 tablespoons water
1 teaspoon Lorann baking emulsion (I use Princess or Sweet Buttery Dough, but you can just plain ol' vanilla if you want)
2 pounds confectioners' sugar, divided
A few tablespoons of butter or Crisco

Directions

Place the butter or Crisco in a shallow dish, and set aside. You'll need this later to put on your hands when kneading the fondant.
Place the marshmallows in a large microwave-safe bowl, and microwave on High for between 30 sec- 1 minute to start melting the marshmallows. Carefully stir the water and vanilla extract into the hot marshmallows, and stir well until the mixture is smooth. Slowly mix in the confectioners' sugar, a cup at a time, until you have a sticky dough. Keep 1 cup of powdered sugar on the side for kneading. The dough will be very stiff.
Rub your hands thoroughly with butter or Crisco, and begin kneading the sticky dough. As you knead, the dough will become workable and pliable. Turn the dough out onto a working surface dusted with confectioners' sugar and continue kneading until the fondant is smooth and no longer sticky to the touch, 5 to 10 minutes.
Form the fondant into a ball, wrap it tightly in plastic wrap, place in an air-tight bag, and let rest for a few hours. You can leave it on the countertop overnight- refrigeration is not required. It will last for a few weeks.

Yep, that's me, getting ready to carve up my layers! Garrrghhhh!!!

Gently carve off the top layers until you get something that looks like this. How deep you need to go depends on the size of your medium pan. You'll need to measure the diameter of your baking pan for this. My pan is 5 inches in diameter (a little less inside, actually), so I cut until the diameter of the middle (white) layer was just under 5 inches.

Do your best to keep your layers level while carving. Take your time!

When both sides have been carved and level, use some buttercream frosting and adhere those layers together! Planet Sandwich- yum!

Go ahead and now crumb coat your newly born planet. Crumb coating is just applying a thin layer of icing on your cake to seal in the crumbs. Refrigerate it overnight to help the icing to solidify. The next day, you can go crazy with frosting, or if you want to paint on it, you can then apply your fondant.

I like to use The Mat for rolling out my fondant. This makes it ridiculously easy to get nice, smooth fondant, and you don't need to worry about rushing.

The Mat is actually two pieces of food safe vinyl. They seal your fondant in while you roll it out. You can move your fondant around and not worry about it tearing, and it doesn't dry out. And you can roll it really thin, too!

Here you can see my fondant before rolling it out. I microwave my fondant for about 15 seconds before kneading and shaping it on The Mat. This makes it really soft and pliable- and reduces the amount of effort getting the fondant rolled nice and thin.

And now here it is all rolled out! It took me about 5 minutes to do. My cake is 8 inches in diameter, so I made sure my fondant was rolled out to 18 inches to be sure I had some extra to work with.

Boo! Looks like a ghost.

When you're ready, take the top layer of The Mat off. The fondant will stick to the bottom layer. Then pick up the bottom layer of The Mat, position it over the cake, and let the fondant gently pull itself off. Check Youtube for a full tutorial on The Mat- you'll be amazed at how it makes working with fondant so easy!

All smoothed out. Looks like a planet to me!

After I smoothed out the fondant, it was time to do the fun part- paint!

My box of edible painting supplies.

A plate worked well as my painters' palette.

With my food safe paint brushes, gel food coloring, and some photos of Jupiter on my computer, I was ready to go!

And this is what it ended up looking like. I'm not a painter, so this is as good as I could do! And just so you can see it all the way around, below is an animated gif of it in action. I can't say it's 100% accurate as Jupiter, but it's not a bad representation, I think!

Jupiter cake rotates (animated gif).

Later we cut into the planet... I don't know why, but doing this made me incredibly nervous!

I wasn't sure if it would look right inside. I mean, it's relatively easy to bake a single cake flavor in a hemisphere pan, but three? How would it really look when put together?

Whew! It held up great!

And it looked nice on the plate, too.

Because the slice was so big, it was necessary for me to divide it in half for my kids. They didn't care- they loved it all!

If I had to be critical of my work, it was that the layers didn't align up perfectly as I wanted them to. Part of the reason for this is that I didn't make enough batter for the blue layer, and I had to cut away more of that layer when carving to get it all nice and level. Next time I'm just going to make a huge amount of the blue vanilla batter to avoid this problem! Still, overall it looks pretty dang cool inside.

And you can see that the kids were happy with it, too. For me, that's what really counts!

Have you tried making a Jupiter cake? Or any other spherical/hemisphere cakes? What did you think about the process? And again, I have to thank Mei-Lynn over at My Ten Friends for sending out this challenge. I don't think I would have tried this cake if a bottle of My Ten Friends nail polish was not involved. :) Cheers!

Troubleshooting Cake Pops

2013-03-12T12:27:00.000-04:00

Having a hard time making cake pops? Cake pop fail completely? Do you wonder how everyone else ends up with gorgeous, adorable, cute cake pops, and yours look like lumps on a stick (if they don't fall off the stick first!)? Well, you've ended up in the right place.

I have found that the most difficult thing about making cake pops is just getting started. My first cake pop experience was a total disaster. It took me a few weeks and a lot of research to finally figure out what I was doing wrong. So, in hopes of saving you time, as well as helping to keep you excited about cake pops (they are really fun!), I have created a troubleshooting guide for cake pops.

Problem	Solution
Cake balls won't hold a ball shape.	You're using too much frosting. Either add more cake, or start a new batch.
Cake balls won't stick together.	You don't have enough frosting in your cake crumb mix. Add a little more until your cake balls stick together.
Cake ball falls off the stick.	You've used too much frosting in your mix, creating a very soft cake ball. Add more cake, or just start over. Use less frosting next time. Keep your cake pops small. They will have a better chance of staying on the stick if they're between 1.25 and 1.5 inches in diameter. You didn't refrigerate your cake balls long enough. Make sure that they are well-chilled before putting on the stick and dipping. You didn't dip your stick into melted candy coating before inserting it into the cake ball. Make sure that this step isn't overlooked.
My candy coating/ chocolate coating is thick and lumpy.	Your temperature that you're melting your coating with is too hot. Keep your candy temps less than 100 degrees- use a candy thermometer. You've gotten water or something that is water-based in your coatings. It can't be salvaged for dipping, but you can use it as glue for decorations on the cake pops. Add an oil-based thinning agent, such as Crisco shortening, or Paramount Crystals.
The coating on my cake pops has cracked.	The cake balls were too cold before dipping. Don't work with frozen cake balls. Allow the cake balls to warm up before dipping. The cake balls were too tightly rolled. Allow some time after removing from the refrigerator for expansion to occur before dipping. Uneven coating. Really thin or uncoated areas in the candy coating after dipping will create weak areas on the surface. As the cake ball expands, this weak spot will be where the crack forms. Make sure your cake pop is completely well-dipped. UPDATE- 8/31/11: After making my Jack-o-Lantern/ Pumpkin cake pops, I've discovered that if you add too much oil-based coloring to the candy coating, your coating will crack on the cake pops after they've cooled. Either keep your oil coloring to a minimum, use a pre-colored candy coating, or try using powdered food coloring. If you add too much thinning agent to your candy, such as Crisco or paramount crystals, you will weaken your candy coating. This can leave it susceptible to cracking. Use less thinning agent next batch.
Oil is seeping through the coating on my cake pop.	Air bubble holes in the coating. As the cake expands under the coating, oils in the cake mix will try to escape through any opening they can find! Pop the air bubbles with a toothpick as the coating is wet (time consuming, and you've got to be eagle-eyed to catch every air bubble!). Try to dam up the hole with a little extra candy coating. This is a messy option that leaves unprofessional results. Dab-dry the oil as it seeps with a paper towel. Eventually it will stop, and the hole won't really be all that visible. My favorite solution is to completely omit the oil when baking the cake mix. Yes, OMIT it. It eliminates the oil seepage problem in my experience. And you're reducing calories in the process!

Help- My Coating Has Bloomed!
Seen this before? Look closely. Notice a difference between these two cake pops? The one on the right looks fabulous. Even coloring, nice covering. The one on the left has streaks. These were from the exact same batch of candy coating. So what went wrong?

This is called bloom. It's something that happens when candy melts get all hot and bothered, or rather, when they've gotten TOO hot. It's a really easy thing to do to melts, especially when you're using a microwave and you don't use a candy thermometer. Bloom is not something you need to worry too much about taste-wise. Candy coating that has bloomed is still safe to eat. It's just that aesthetically, it's not as pretty.

In the photo above, the bloomed cake pop (left) was dipped before the normal cake pop (right). I noticed that my coating was beginning to bloom once the cake pop coating had dried. Gah! You'd think that if a batch of candy coating is blooming, that there's nothing you can do, and all your cake pops will have that bloom look to them. Nope! It can be fixed! Again, I was able to fix my coating after I noticed bloom, and the result is the nicely coated cake pop on the right.

I picked up this tip from a beautiful and fabulous book called Chocolates and Confections (at Home with the Culinary Institute of America). While this book focuses on chocolates, many of the methods can also be used with candy coating. Okay, so how to fix bloomed candy coating. You must have a candy thermometer for this. They're relatively inexpensive, and can be found at most supermarkets. Bloom happens when candy coating has gotten too hot. If you want to restore the coating from its bloom state, simply add several tablespoons of unmelted candy coating to the overheated candy melts. Do not reheat it. Stir them until they all have melted. Candy melts have a fairly low melt temperature, but this may take you a few minutes of stirring. Be patient, and keep stirring until everything is smooth.

Now check the temperature. Lately, I've found that your goal temperature to prevent bloom is below 90 degrees. If the temperature is still above that, add a few more candy melts, and stir until smooth. You want your candy melts to be completely melted and smooth below 90 degrees. Once it is, try dipping another cake pop, and examine at the coating as it dries. You should notice that the bloom is gone! If you need to reheat your candy melts, be sure to do it very slowly. When I use a microwave to reheat, I keep the power level at 40%, and for no more than 30 seconds at a time. And I verify the temperature (not too hot!) to make sure I haven't 'bloomed' my melts.

One more tip, but this is about decorating the cake pops. I love using edible ink pens to draw faces or designs on my cake pops. Some people have trouble making edible ink go on nicely on the cake pop. First, make sure you're using a good quality edible ink pen. I use Aetco or Americolor edible ink pens, and I found them on Amazon.

They work best if your candy coating is dry and fairly oil-free. If you use a lot of Crisco shortening to thin your candy coating, then your pens won't draw on your cake pops well at all- they make the coating fairly oily. Using Paramount Crystals to thin your coating makes for nice, smooth coating and won't add greasiness, which makes drawing on the pops a breeze.

Now, even with the best edible ink pens, you'll run into problems from time to time. Most of the time, you'll find that your pen simply begins to dry out. How annoying! Especially when you've got more than 50 faces to draw!

Here's an easy way to deal with an edible ink pen that isn't cooperating. You'll need a small plate and some food color gel. Here I'm using a black pen with black food color gel.

Squirt out a small amount of the gel onto the plate. Dip the edible ink pen nib into the gel, using it as if you were dipping a paint brush into paint.

Get your cake pop ready! Here you can see the gel at the tip of my pen.

Now gently 'paint' the food color gel onto your pop.

You'll end up with nice, dark, colors that look professionally created. As long as you've got gel food colors on hand, you'll never have to worry about dried-out or poor performance of your edible ink pens again!

This method worked fabulously for me this year. I made almost 100 jack-o-lantern cake pops for my kids' class parties, and every little face on them looked perfect!

Happy popping!

Swedish Fish Candy Sushi Treats (No Bake!)

2013-02-14T01:23:00.004-05:00

Well, it's been awhile since my last post! I've been in the throes.of a major life change, namely selling our house (successful!) and trying (unsuccessfully) to find a new one. We're in a kind of limbo with renting a place and all of our personal items in boxes at a storage unit. This includes all of my baking tools and decorating supplies. Sigh. The kitchen in our rental is straight from the 1970's collection, complete with avocado green tiles on the counter and dark brown hollow-door cabinets. The gas oven is vintage 1972, and the temperature fluctuates by 50 degrees. So, this means no baking for me, because I don't like to be surprised when I bake. Waaahhhh! :(

So I have been busy with a nail blog, because, let's face it, nail art is kind of like cake pops, just less calories. I still frequent Pinterest, and yesterday I saw the most adorable NO BAKE project. I decided to make up 50+ of these for my kids' Valentine's Day parties. And it was super-duper-wow-I-can't-believe-how-cute-they-are easy! Here's how to do it:

You'll need:
Rice krispie treats
Green fruit rollups
Swedish fish (the larger ones, not the tiny ones!)

I made a big batch of rice krispie treats for this, but you can half the recipe easily.

10 cups rice krispie cereal
1/2 cup butter
6 cups marshmallows
2 pinches salt
two teaspoons vanilla (or other flavoring you prefer)

Put the marshmallows, vanilla, salt, and butter in a big microwave-safe bowl. Microwave on high for 2 minutes. Stir until smooth. Pour in your rice krispies and mix well.

There are rice krispie treats drying under this sheet of wax paper!

Divide up the mixture into two for easy shaping. Line a 9x14 baking dish with wax paper, allowing about 2 extra inches to extend over the sides. Pour half the mix into the dish. With another large piece of wax paper, completely cover the top of the treats, and crush them all flat into the dish (it doesn't need to be perfect). This way, you won't get any mess on your hands while flattening them! You want these to be about 1 inch deep in the pan. Once you've flattened out your treats, simply lift them out of the pan with the wax paper to allow them to dry a bit.

Using a candy fish as a guideline for the size of the treats.

Cut your treats into small rectangles. You want them to be just a bit larger than your fish. Gently soften the edges and mold them into a slightly rounded rectangle. Place a Swedish Fish on the rectangle. Now for the wrap!

Using the treat as a guide to see how wide I need to cut the fruit strip.

If you use the fruit roll ups that come in one large circle, simply make 5-6 long cuts on the circle to make several 1-2 inch strips. I used a knife to make my long cuts. You could use a pizza cutter, and it would work just as well. Take one of the strips and wrap it around the rectangle and fish. Make sure the seam is at the bottom. It should stick to itself.

And that's it! There are other shapes of candy sushi you can make as well, but I didn't have time for this project. These candy sushi treats are not only easy to make, but they look adorable as well. The kids love 'em!

Since I don't currently have access to treat bags, I bagged each treat inside of a snack-sized baggie. Presentation-wise, it's wasn't as pretty as I'd like it to be, but at least each one will stay fresh for the kids!

These were a really big hit at my kids' school. The best part for me was that they didn't take that long to whip up, and they looked so flippin' adorable! Oh, and I didn't have to use that crazy oven of mine. Give this recipe a try- you'll be glad you did. Cheers!

Tiered Fondant Birthday Present Cake

2012-06-03T12:54:00.001-04:00

With all the sweets I've been making lately, I knew that the least I could do for my (amazing) husband's 45th birthday was to make him a cake. I asked him what he wanted it to look like, and all he said was, "I want a square cake." Typical man, right?

It took me three days to get this whole thing together, but it wasn't the most challenging cake I've ever made. I had to allow extra time for the detail items to dry (like the bow and curls). If you're familiar with fondant, this kind of thing is a breeze. If you're not, it might take you a little longer, but it's not that hard to do!

So if you want to make this cake, here's what you need to know. First, I make my own fondant. Marshmallow fondant is super easy to make, and it's cost effective, too! Here's the recipe I use:

Marshmallow Fondant (also known as MMF):

Ingredients

1 (16 ounce) package miniature marshmallows

4 tablespoons water
1 teaspoon Lorann baking emulsion (I use Princess or Sweet Buttery Dough, but you can just plain ol' vanilla if you want)
2 pounds confectioners' sugar, divided
A few tablespoons of butter or Crisco

Directions

Place the butter or Crisco in a shallow dish, and set aside. You'll need this later to put on your hands when kneading the fondant.
Place the marshmallows in a large microwave-safe bowl, and microwave on High for between 30 sec- 1 minute to start melting the marshmallows. Carefully stir the water and vanilla extract into the hot marshmallows, and stir well until the mixture is smooth. Slowly mix in the confectioners' sugar, a cup at a time, until you have a sticky dough. Keep 1 cup of powdered sugar on the side for kneading. The dough will be very stiff.
Rub your hands thoroughly with butter or Crisco, and begin kneading the sticky dough. As you knead, the dough will become workable and pliable. Turn the dough out onto a working surface dusted with confectioners' sugar and continue kneading until the fondant is smooth and no longer sticky to the touch, 5 to 10 minutes.
Form the fondant into a ball, wrap it tightly in plastic wrap, place in an air-tight bag, and let rest for a few hours. You can leave it on the countertop overnight- refrigeration is not required. It will last for a few weeks.

I made two batches of MMF for this cake. You'll end up with extra MMF.

I used half of one of the batches to make the decorations. Divide that into three portions. I kneaded gel food coloring in electric purple, electric green, and electric orange to get the colors you see here. (Make sure you store your fondant in an air tight bag when not using!) To that, I added a small amount of Gum-Tex to the fondant to help harden up the fondant. Gum-Tex and fondant together are easier to work with than just gum paste alone because Gum-Tex/fondant dries more slowly. The challenge to this is that you need to allow more time for these to dry well, so plan on making these at least 2 days before your cake.

Using a star fondant plunger cutter in three sizes, I cut out lots of little stars. Easy! By the way, I bought my set of three star plunger cutters on eBay- they were less than three bucks for the set!

The curls were created by making long thin strips of the fondant rolled about 1/16 inch thick. Using a wooden dowel about 1/4 inch thick (see the lower left corner of the photo with the curls and stars), gently wrap the strip in a long spiral, and let it set out to dry for a few hours. When your time is up, gently slide the curl off the dowel . When they're still soft, you can gently make bends in the curls if you want (or you can just leave 'em straight). Set aside to fully dry for at least 2 days. You need to make sure these are completely dry and hard before placing on the cake or else they WILL break! This happened to me, so I'm passing along this tip so it won't happen to you.

I didn't get photos of the pieces of the bow I created, but here's how I did it (in a nutshell). I rolled out fondant to about 1/16 thick, and made 1-inch wide strips about 8 inches long. I made 14 of these. I formed these into large teardrop shapes and glued the ends together. Dry them on their sides so they will hold their loop shape. Flatten out one of the sides, so it will look more like a pear on one side and flat on the other. This is so when you form your bow, the flat bottoms will sit nicely against the cake. Cut the end so that it resembles a V shape. Now make a 1/4 inch thick, 3-inch wide fondant circle and a 2-inch circle from the same color fondant. Set aside. Let these dry well, or else they will break when you assemble the bow!

You can also make your cake in advance, too. I baked two cakes: an 8-inch square cake, and a 6-inch square cake (I use Fat Daddio pans). After each cake fully cooled, I torted them into two layers, wrapped each layer in plastic wrap, then wrapped each cake together in plastic, then sealed them up with foil. Once all that was done, I put both cakes in the freezer until I was ready to decorate. I took photos of the 6-inch cake as I was filling it so you can see what I did.

The 6-inch cake is a vanilla cake (box mix) that I added banana extract to. The spots you see in the cake? Mini chocolate chips, of course! I added the chocolate chips myself- you must try this flavor combination because it's incredible!

I planned for the fondant to be white, and the filling for this layer was going to be chocolate. I didn't want the filling to show through the fondant, so I piped a dam of stiff buttercream about 1/4 inch inside the edges of the cake. You don't need a special tip for this, just use a bag and empty tip coupler.

I piped the chocolate buttercream (medium consistency) inside the dam. Remember, no need to have a piping tip for this- just use the empty coupler!

Then pop the second layer on top! Looks like a huge chocolate chip cookie sandwich to me. Yum!

I used a large piping bag and a Wilton tip 789 to apply the crumb coat. This bag is ridiculously huge- it's so big that I can fit my ENTIRE arm in it. I need to buy a smaller one soon. Needless to say, I didn't have to fill the whole bag to ice this cake.

I'm not very good at icing with this tip, but it speeds up getting the buttercream onto the cake.

A bit messy, but I don't need perfection with the crumb coat.

Let me add a great tip to help with the appearance of your cake. Have you ever seen a layer cake with frosting bulging out of the middle? Be sure to let your cake settle for at least a few hours before applying your final coat (either frosting or fondant). Professional bakers let their cakes settle for 24 hours after applying the crumb coat. Some people place a ceramic tile or book on top of their cake to speed this process up. I forgot to do this step, and I ended up with some bulging. I don't think anyone but me noticed, but I didn't like it. So learn from my mistake and settle your cake well before decorating!

This is the 8-inch layer, covered in the white fondant. I made the orange ribbons by rolling out fondant to between 1/4 inch thick, and cutting it with a fondant roller. I applied one strip to each side with edible glue. Edible glue can be made by mixing a small amount of Gum-Tex with boiling water. Let it cool, and it will turn into a gel. Apply the glue to the fondant with a brush, and place the strip of fondant onto the cake. Hold it gently in place for a few seconds to let it set. It dries clear, and is really effective for sticking decorations on!

I also added 5 wooden dowels into the cake for support. Simply insert the dowel into the cake and mark the dowel where the top of it just sticks out of the cake. Pull the dowel out of the cake and cut at the mark. Then put the cut dowel back in the cake.

Here is the cake with the second layer added. I made fondant ribbons from the green fondant, cutting with the fondant roller cutter.

I really like how the green ribbon turned out!

To be honest, I didn't have a set plan in mind when I began decorating this cake. Not always a good idea when it comes to cake design! I didn't like how the bottom edges of my cakes were looking, so I had to think of something to do to cover them up. And I wanted to add a purple element to the cake. So I opted to make a purple 'ribbon' along the bottom edges, and it worked!

I was rushing my cake along, so I didn't get pics of all the steps of making this cake!

I didn't let my bow loops dry completely, and they began cracking on me when I assembled the bow. Here's how the assembly goes when everything actually works:

Glue several of the loops onto the 3-inch circle, in a circle with the points of the Vs touching. It should resemble the beginnings of the bottom of a big bow. Once this is dry, glue the 2-inch fondant circle on top of the Vs. Once these are dry, add another layer of bow loops. You can see where this goes. My loops began falling apart on me at this point, so I improvised by adding curls wherever I saw too much space. I did this by using stiff buttercream in a piping bag with an empty tip coupler (the same stuff I used when piping the dam on the layers). I used the buttercream as a thick glue to support all the curls, and it worked! No one noticed my flawed bow at all. Whew! Remember, whenever decorating a cake, there are no accidents- just more opportunities to embellish!

For the final touch, I added lots of those tiny stars I made earlier. Using my Gum-Tex glue and a brush, I gently glued tiny stars all over the cake.

I like the combination of colors, and it turned out so festive! My mother-in-law thought it was just an elaborately wrapped gift when she first saw it.

I carried this cake in my lap in the car to the restaurant where we celebrated my husband's birthday, and I think that it weighed about 10 pounds. I was terrified that it wouldn't make the trip. It was a 45-minute drive down a winding mountain road.

Much to my relief, it did make it. I received many, many compliments on it from the staff and from patrons of the restaurant. Many people thought it was professionally made. But the most important thing for me was that my husband had a cake that he would always remember. He absolutely loved it. And I love him. :)

Happy birthday, Sweetie!

Mother's Day Rose Cupcakes

2012-05-05T02:18:00.001-04:00

I have recently discovered how to make a rose out of buttercream. <squeal!> My two most favorite things on the planet (aside from my kids and husband, of course). So I thought I'd share a recent creation I made for my kids with you: buttercream rose topped cupcakes. And as I was making these, I thought how wonderful this would make for a Mother's Day gift! Well, as things go with me, my mom has told me she doesn't like sweet stuff (cake pops included, can you believe it?). So I made these for my kids, but YOU could make a batch of these up for your own mom, and she'll love you for it. As long as she likes cupcakes covered with buttercream roses, that is!

These are soooo dang easy! Really. You will wonder why you haven't used a piping bag for all your cupcakes in the past. And did I mention how FAST they are to do? I didn't? Well, let me tell you, they're faaaaast to make!

I used a box cake mix to make my cupcakes. I made a dozen of the mini-sized cupcakes (I was experimenting with my new Breville convection toaster oven- it's awesome, BTW), and almost two dozen regular sized cupcakes. I let them cool completely before adding the buttercream.

I make my own buttercream. The recipe was given to me, and I don't know if I have permission to display it here, so if you want a delish buttercream recipe, email me, and I'll send it to you privately. I changed it a bit for my own tastes, though. I added the "Princess" baking emulsion to it (Lorann) instead of vanilla, and it really makes the flavor pop. I love all Lorann's baking emulsions, though!

After whipping up a batch of buttercream, I thinned it to medium consistency for piping. Then I colored half of it pink. Wanna know a very tidy way of filling a piping bag? Wrap it in plastic wrap first! You want to use an amount about the size of a very small burrito.

Tie off the ends of the plastic wrap, and when you're ready to use it, just cut off the end that goes down into the piping bag. You'll never have to worry about icing leaking through the wrong end of the bag ever again.

For this project, I chose to use two colors, but you could use one, and the result would still be very nice. I inserted two plastic wrapped buttercream 'burritos' into a piping bag,.

I pressed down on them gently so they evenly worked their way into the piping tip.

Before going on, I want to show you about how ridiculously easy it is to empty and reuse a piping bag if you use the 'buttercream burrito' method. Just pull out the empty 'burrito' (see the two empty ones here in this pic?), and pop in a new one. It takes just a few seconds, and there's almost no mess whatsoever.

I used a Wilton tip 21 for the mini cupcakes.

Here I made some test swirls on a plate to practice. Cool, huh?

Cute little rose swirls on bite-sized mini cupcakes. You get the rose effect by starting your piping in the CENTER of the cupcake and swirling out to the edge. I like to apply a lot of pressure as I begin in the center, and taper off as I finish the outer edge of the swirl. I wish I had an extra set of hands to show step by step how it looks as it comes together. Honestly, it's not difficult to make, though. Now on to the regular sized cupcakes!

And for bigger cupcakes, I needed a bigger piping tip. Well, hello Wilton 2D! I think you are my new favorite piping tip!

Starting the piping in the CENTER of the cupcake, you swirl around until you get to the outer edge. And you end up with a very pretty rose-like creation!

They each took me just a few seconds to make.

And there's not too much frosting to cake ratio going on here, either. I like that!

Ooooh! So pretty I wish I could make a corsage out of them!

Okay, so just for comparison's sake, here is what the piping looks like if you start at the OUTSIDE of the cupcake and swirl your way to the middle. Essentially, it's the complete opposite of how to make a buttercream rose. Still, it's cute, I think!

Another shot from above comparing the two piping techniques. Again, the tip used is Wilton 2D for all of them. For the roses, you pipe and swirl from the center. For the frilly mounds, you pipe and swirl from the outside. Got it?

Hope you enjoyed these little bites of beauty. And a happy Mother's Day to all you hard working mommas out there!

Springtime Easter Cupcakes with Fondant Animals

2012-03-27T19:23:00.003-04:00

The Internet is so incredible. I mean, I'm so inspired by so many people out there who do such creative and amazing work, and take the time to post about their creations! Often I find myself looking around for ideas about one project, and then *paf!* I'm suddenly finding other ideas for projects that I want to do. This is about one of those projects. Today I created 36 springtime Easter cupcakes with fondant animals. And here is how I did it.

Have I mentioned before that I love working with fondant? Fondant is really my friend. We get along great. My BFF. Not only does fondant cover cakes beautifully, but it can be formed into anything, from brick facades to flowers, and for this time, animals. I make my own marshmallow fondant, and it's freaky-easy to do. Don't let fondant intimidate you: she's pretty easy going despite her reputation. Here's the recipe I use:

http://allrecipes.com/recipe/marshmallow-fondant/

Marshmallow Fondant (also known as MMF):
Ingredients

1/4 cup butter
1 (16 ounce) package miniature marshmallows
4 tablespoons water
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 pounds confectioners' sugar, divided

Directions

Place the butter in a shallow bowl, and set aside.
Place the marshmallows in a large microwave-safe bowl, and microwave on High for 30 seconds to 1 minute to start melting the marshmallows. Carefully stir the water and vanilla extract into the hot marshmallows, and stir until the mixture is smooth. Slowly beat in the confectioners' sugar, a cup at a time, until you have a sticky dough. Reserve 1 cup of powdered sugar for kneading. The dough will be very stiff.
Rub your hands thoroughly with butter, and begin kneading the sticky dough. As you knead, the dough will become workable and pliable. Turn the dough out onto a working surface dusted with confectioners' sugar and continue kneading until the fondant is smooth and no longer sticky to the touch, 5 to 10 minutes.
Form the fondant into a ball, wrap it tightly in plastic wrap, and refrigerate overnight. To use, allow the fondant to come to room temperature, and roll it out onto a flat surface dusted with confectioners' sugar.

And of course you can buy pre-made fondant, but WHY? It's expensive and tastes awful. Homemade fondant tastes amazing, and is cheap to make. So do yourself a favor and whip up a batch.

Once you've got your fondant made, you're ready to make your animals. Make a portion of fondant in different colors: yellow, pink, orange, and white. You will also need black, but you can make black fondant out of your extra orange fondant later. Wrap each color in plastic wrap and seal in a Ziploc bag. One batch of marshmallow fondant (MMF) using the recipe above makes more than enough to make 36 animals for 36 cupcakes.

I began with making the white bodies of the sheep. Take a small amount (about 1.5") and make it into a ball.

With a stick, press an x shape gently into the fondant.

Pinch the corners into small legs.

When you're done, you will have something that- to me- looks something like a molar (tooth) with short roots. I made nine of these.

Since I was working with white fondant, I made the bunny bodies next. I forgot to take photos of that process, sorry! I set them aside to dry and firm up a bit. Seal the extra fondant in the bag- you're going to need it for detail work later.

Then I made pink bodies for the pigs. The pigs were a little more challenging because I had to form the head and body as one piece. But I was able to make it work. The legs were formed in the same way as the sheep.

I pinched off small pink pieces of similar size to form the ears. I rolled the piece into a small ball, and used the end of my paintbrush to make an indentation like an ear.

Then I painted my edible glue on the head and placed the ears on.

And how do you make edible glue? Take a small amount of Gum-Tex and a few tablespoons of boiled water and mix well. It will form into a gel that works as an amazing edible glue! It's almost invisible, too. Refrigerate it overnight if you have the time for it to really set up well. It's good for about a week. You use a food safe paintbrush to dab the gel on whatever you want to stick.

Next, I took a little larger piece of pink fondant and made a ball. I made it into a flattened oval to make the nose.

I used a toothpick to make the nostrils.

Then I glued it onto the pig's face.

Using an edible ink marker, I drew on eyes.

Oink! Oink!

I can't help but smile when I see a group of pigs on top of a container of Crisco! Ha!

Normally, I like to use the Americolor edible ink pens, but on fondant, I found that the CopyKake pens performed much better. Make sure you put your extra pink fondant in a tightly sealed bag- you will need the extra fondant for more detail work later.

And of course, these little guys had to have little tiny tails. So cute!

Last, I made the yellow chicks. These were so easy! Take a small amount of fondant and mold it into a chick shape.

I rolled out a long stringy piece and cut it into small pieces. Then I placed each piece on top of the head as "hair", attached gently with a toothpick and edible glue. Small wings were made from fondant- they're teardrop shaped. I made a small orange 'beak' from the orange fondant. I just pinched off a small amount and formed it by hand and attached it with edible glue. Eyes were drawn on with edible ink marker.

At this point, I stopped for the day so my new creatures could dry out a bit and harden up. I set to finish my detail work the next day.

I began by rolling out small pink balls for the sheep heads. I tried to make sure that each 'head' was in proportion to a body. Then I attached the heads to the bodies with my edible glue. I then moved on to making other creatures so the heads would be completely dry on the bodies before adding additional weight with the ears and 'fleece'.

During this time, I made my black fondant using some extra orange fondant. I wrapped it in plastic wrap and placed it in an air tight bag to rest while I got to finishing up the other animals. The black will be the ears and nose for the sheep.

I washed my hands well and decided to get back to the bunnies. Using white fondant, I made two small balls for 'hands', and one small ball for a 'tail'. All were attached with edible glue.

After attaching all the hands and tails, I moved to my pink fondant for the ears and nose.

I pinched off small amounts of pink for the ears, and using the end of my paintbrush and edible glue, I gently worked the pink 'ear' into the inner part of the rabbit's ear. A small amount of pink was also used for the nose. Add two small edible ink drawn eyes, and the bunny is complete!

After this, I figured my sheep heads were dry on their bodies, so I decided to form their ears and noses with the black fondant.

The ears are small teardrop shapes, attached with edible glue.

The noses are just little round black fondant balls. Draw on the eyes. I washed my hands to remove all traces of black, then began to finish up with the sheep's 'fleece'.

Using white fondant, take small amounts and make teeny tiny balls. When you have about a dozen of these, paint the entire sheep's head between the ears with edible glue and gently put the balls on the head.

They will stick very easily and stay put. Baaaaaaaa!!!

Now let everything dry overnight. You're going to give them all their own place to hang out tomorrow!

The following day, I baked 36 chocolate cupcakes. I found these adorable brown and pink flowered cupcake liners that work very well with the springtime theme of these cupcakes!

I used a green buttercream frosting in a piping bag and a grass tip (Wilton #233).

I covered the cupcake in green grass.

Then I placed the little sheep and pigs on top. Easy!

The chicks needed a nest, though. Using another grass tip and piping bag, I used chocolate frosting and swirled the frosting into a nest shape.

Then I placed the chick inside.

The Easter Bunnies wouldn't be complete without Easter eggs around them. I used Whopper Robin Eggs, Cadbury chocolate eggs and speckled egg M & M's placed around Mr. Rabbit.

I love how these turned out! These are so dang cute that I don't know how anyone can eat them. They're destined to go to my children's preschool tomorrow, so somehow, I don't think any of the kids will have a problem with gobbling up these springtime treats!

Rainbow Inside the Gold: Lucky St. Patrick's Day Cake Pops

2012-03-14T20:59:00.001-04:00

Oh, how I love holidays! Any holiday. Actually, any special event will do. It gives me an excuse to make cake pops! With March 17th rapidly approaching, what an excuse for me to make another batch of rainbow cake pops. But these aren't just any rainbow cake pops. These will be lucky gold cake pops with rainbow cake inside. So instead of finding gold at the end of the rainbow, you'll find a rainbow inside of the gold. A twist on the typical St. Paddy's day theme, but it works, I think. And since these special lucky cake pops are destined to be consumed by about 40 preschoolers, I don't think they'll care what the typical theme of St. Patrick's day is!

For those of you who have already viewed my tutorial about how to make rainbow cake pops, you'll see some similar info here. I used a white cake mix (sans oil), and prepared five different bowls with electric gel colors. They're kind of like neon colors, bright and colorful. I used electric purple, electric blue, electric green, electric orange, and electric yellow for the colors of my springtime rainbow.

Each color was poured into 6 separate lined cupcake cups. I was able to get six cupcakes of each color from one batch of cake mix.

After they were baked, then cooled, I peeled off the paper liners and separated them into bowls: one for each color. Then they were well crumbled. Keep each color well apart from the other colors, or else you'll end up with different colored crumbs in your cake crumble mix!

Add barely a teaspoon of frosting into each bowl of crumbs. Remember that you don't need a lot of frosting in cake pops, or else you'll get mush! Mix the frosting well.

Then take the crumbs for each color and make one huge cake ball. So for the orange crumbs, you will make one huge cake ball. For the blue crumbs, you will make one huge cake ball. Get it? There is a reason for this!

Set your big cake balls into separate bowls. Don't refrigerate them. You're going to get to work!

Set up a work station, ideally somewhere you can sit with a table. Have 5 small clean plates, a roll of plastic wrap, and a cookie sheet on this table with your big cake balls. Now, get yourself some coffee, then have a seat. You're going to be working for about 2 hours constructing these cake balls, so make yourself comfy! Of course, if you have a helper or two (I did not), this will go much more quickly.

Ready? Go!

Pinch off a small amount from one of the big cake balls. Work with one color at a time so you don't mix your colors. Roll it in your hands until you get a small ball. It should be about the size of a marble. Place it on your clean plate. You want to aim for about 1/5 of each color in the pop for an even distribution of color. You should end up with about 40-45 cake 'marbles' from each color.

When you've turned your big cake ball into lots of little cake 'marbles', cover them all with plastic wrap, wash your hands, and sit back down. Take a few sips of your coffee. Stretch.

Do NOT refrigerate your 'marbles'- you need them soft for when you make the rainbow cake ball. All right, ready for the assembly?

Take one marble of each color. You should have five, if you haven't been keeping up with me. Place them in a pentagon formation.

Smush them together gently.

Then work them into a ball. Voila! You've made your rainbow cake ball!

Place your new creation on a cookie sheet, and lightly cover it with plastic wrap. You will need a sheet of plastic large enough to cover the whole tray. This way, you can place your cake balls under the plastic wrap and they won't dry out while you assemble the rest of the batch.

When you have no more marbles left of one color, you can get creative and put together whatever color mixes you want- like I've shown here.

Now that you've created your cake balls, go ahead and make sure they're well-covered with plastic wrap and put them into the refrigerator. Leave them there for a few hours so they can firm up. If you don't do this step, your cake balls will likely fall off the stick when you try to dip them.

After a few hours, you're ready for dipping! I like to put my chilled cake balls into batches of 9 or 10 in small Ziploc containers. It helps to keep the small batch I have out of the fridge cool. And it speeds things up when you're ready to dip some more cake pops (remember that I don't use an appliance to keep my candy coating warm when I dip). Also, by moving the balls into containers, I avoid the condensation buildup that always seems to drip on my cake balls from the plastic wrap. And sometimes I don't always get the plastic completely over the cake balls in the refrigerator. You know what happens? They dry out quickly and crack when you put the stick in them! Little containers avoid that altogether.

Okay, so for those of you who don't know about candy melts, here are some general tips.

Keep the temperature of your candy melts UNDER 100 DEGREES. If you heat more than that, your coating will become really, really, grumpy with you and it will thicken up like molasses. You won't end up with smooth, thin coating at all. Be sure to use a candy thermometer. I do. Every single time I melt candy coating.
Use about a tablespoon or two of either paramount crystals or Crisco shortening per 14 oz bag of melts to thin your candy melts. I have yet to meet anyone (who successfully makes lots of cake pops, that is!) who doesn't do this. You just can't get good thin coating without it.
Don't even think of getting water anywhere near your melted coating. It'll make your coating thicken up in no time at all, and you can't salvage it for dipping. Water and oil-based coating don't mix!
When melting using a microwave, be sure to heat your melts at 50% power for one minute, then at 50% power in thirty second intervals until you get everything melted. STAY UNDER 100 DEGREES!!!

I used white Wilton's candy melts with paramount crystals in this batch. Once melted, I stuck my stick in the melted coating.

Next I quickly put that into a cake ball. Then I dipped!

NOTE: If you want to have smooth coating around the whole cake pop (i.e., no lump of candy coating at the bottom "collar" around where your stick meets the cake pop), then you must dip your pop very quickly after inserting the stick. This "collar" of coating is still wet, and it will melt with the additional coating when you dip the entire thing. If you let it sit out, or refrigerate the pop when it looks like the photo to the left, this lump will stay visible. If your cake/frosting mix is the right consistency, it should not fall off the stick when you immediately dip. If it falls off, your cake/frosting mix is too soft.

I had to be careful not to tap too much excess off because if I did, then you could see the colors through the white coating. And if you make your coating too thin, then you may end up with cracking, too!

Okay, so now I've got almost 50 white cake pops. Now to make 'em shine!

I took some gold luster dust and a dry decorating brush.

I dipped the brush in the dry powder and dusted the gold all over the cake pop.

It leaves a very nice sheen, and looks quite elegant.

Here's a tip if you're working with dry luster dust. Place a small plate or tray under your working area. This will catch the dust that falls off the pop, and you can reuse it. When you're all finished, the extra dust in this plate can be returned to the container of luster dust, so you're reducing waste.

Another tip, but this is about cake pops cracking. This tends to be a real common problem for everyone. Something people do to try to prevent cracking in the coating is double dipping the cake pop. Yes, this can work, and quite well, because you're essentially strengthening the outer coating. But there's one caveat. You must make sure your second dip completely covers the cake pop, from top all the way to around the stick. If you don't, you'll end up with a weak spot where the second layer of coating didn't cover. And this can lead to cracking. Check out my pics to see what I'm talking about (and if you click on the pics, you can see a much bigger pic with more detail). You can see the crack begins at the point where the second dip didn't coat completely.

Then the crack spreads up the sides of the pop.

This happened to two out of 52 pops that I didn't double dip completely.

Here is a finished basket of gold rainbow pops next to some gold and white cake pops.

The photos don't do these pops justice! The gold is so shiny on these!

Now you're wanting to see the inside of these, right? You're in luck! I ate one just so I could take pics of it.

Yeah! Rainbow goodness wrapped up in gold!

Half the batch I left plain gold, like this.

The other half, I used a green edible ink pen and drew four leaf clovers. Here's what they looked like. This was super easy to do!

I took all of those and placed them in a green basket with green paper 'grass'. So fun- and lucky, too!

Happy St. Patrick's Day to you with rainbow filled gold cake pops!

Happy Birthday to ME! (or How I Made My Own Birthday Cake)

2012-03-02T20:13:00.000-05:00

Well, as it happens every year, today is my birthday! Yay, me! Today I'm 41, and still healthy, happy, and I feel really good about life.

Since I've been taking an intro cake decorating class over the past few weeks, I thought it would be fun to make my own cake for my birthday. And appropriate to early March, I decided to make a spring cherry blossom cake.

I made a white cake and tinted it blue. I thought it would look great to slice into a light green cake and see the blue inside. Kind of like seeing the sky against grass. I made a 9" cake in a 3" deep pan. I torted it into two layers.

Here I've made a double layer of dam with stiff frosting to put my filling inside the cake. Oh, did I say filling?

What's this, you ask? Heaven in a bowl!

It's going to become whipped chocolate ganache for my filling. Yummmmm!

I took one cup of heavy whipping cream and heated just until boiling. Then I poured it into a bowl containing 4 oz of chopped up semisweet chocolate. I gently mixed it all until the chocolate was melted completely in the cream. Then I chilled it overnight. You can make this up to 4 days before whipping. Don't whip it until just before you need it!

Here's what it all looks like after spending some quality time with my KitchenAid mixer. Like I said, heaven in a bowl.

Put the chocolate ganache into the middle of the cake and spread out evenly.

Until it looks something like this.

Then I took the other layer and gently set it on top of it all.

I used an electric green gel to tint my frosting.

Here is my white spatula with the green frosting in the background.

I used an icing bag and tip 789 to frost the cake. I'm still learning how to use it!

Crumb coated. Not perfectly smooth, but it doesn't need to be at this point.

I played around a little with spraying the frosting with water on top to get a really smooth surface. It works nicely! But again, this was just a first coat. It ended the day in the fridge to rest.

Next day- my birthday! More pale green frosting added for the second coat.

I made these petite pink flowers a few days ago. So perfect for this kind of cake!

Bigger dark pink flowers, also made a few days ago. Making flowers in advance makes it really easy to decorate a cake!

More experimenting with techniques. This is called the paper towel method to help smooth out the frosting. You can end up with some neat patterns if that's what you're looking for.

I smoothed out the sides and top with parchment paper. I ran out of time, so I wasn't able to get the frosting as smooth as I wanted it. Still, it looked good, considering that it was my very first time making a cake with smooth buttercream frosting!

I take a lot of joy in knowing that the cake enjoyed with my family tonight was a gift from me to them.

And there's something really cool about writing "happy birthday to ME!" on a cake.

After all, birthdays are the only time when you can truly say that "It's all about ME!" and no one thinks you're being bitchy.

Hope you enjoyed seeing my cake!

Academy Awards Oscar Cake Pops

2012-02-25T14:50:00.000-05:00

I loooooove the Oscars. The ceremony. The movies. The dresses. The celebrities. And the Awards! Who doesn't want to hold an Oscar and thank the Academy? In celebration of one of my favorite times of the year, and For Your Consideration- Oscar Pops!

You start with your basic cake/frosting mix. Instead of making balls, you'll need to sculpt Oscar forms.

I used a photo I downloaded and printed as a guide for the shape I needed. Let me first say that I am NOT a sculptor, so I wasn't able to get the cake pop exactly perfect. My Oscars are a little plump and short. They ARE cake pops, so I figure after Oscar met Cake Pop, he'd get shorter and more plump anyways. I couldn't go too slim or long with the design or else it wouldn't stay intact on the stick.

So you can better see the size of what I was working with, check out this pic. A normal-sized cake ball is on the upper left. It is about 1.25" in diameter.

The cake ball I needed size-wise is below that. I would NEVER make a cake ball that size to just dip in chocolate in a round shape. It's much, much too big, and I don't think it would stay put on the stick.

But you need that size in order to form the shape of the Oscar pop. This needs to have just enough length and bulk to stay on the stick. Too small, and it'll fall off the stick. Too big, and it'll fall apart when dipping due to the weight.

Okay, so after forming your ball, you'll need to shape your Oscar. Roll it out into a cigar shape, then gently pinch and press to form the head and body shape.

Pinch a bit more to form ridges where the arms cross over the chest, and use a toothpick to press to define the neck area.

Press to smooth out bumpy areas, and use a toothpick to form ridges where the legs separate.

Here is my tray of formed chocolate Oscars. It took me about an hour to make them all. I ended up with 12 of them- it was all I could get out of one box of cake mix. They look a little creepy to me- I kept thinking that they all looked more like a bunch of dead guys, and that I was creating a makeshift graveyard.

I was glad to get them covered up with plastic wrap and into the fridge. My 'morgue', muhahahahaha....

Okay, now to address something about candy melts. First, people often ask what I use to melt my coating. Here it is. A 2 cup glass measuring cup. I empty half of the 14 oz bag into the cup, along with some paramount crystals.

Next, I'm often asked "How much of the paramount crystals do you put in your melts?" I don't exactly measure, to be honest. So here's a photo of how much I add. This will be enough for the entire 14oz bag. I'm guessing that it's about a tablespoon or two.

Now, why have I put my melted chocolate into a coffee travel mug?! Simple: I needed a container that was deep enough to dip my Oscars in. The 2 cup glass measuring cup was just too shallow to get a good dip and coat everything nicely. Looking through my cabinets, I realized that a travel mug would do nicely, and keep my melted chocolate nice and warm.

Before I added the melted coating, I warmed up the mug by filling it with very hot water. I made sure to dry out the inside of it very well- ANY trace of water can cause the chocolate to go all grumpy and lumpy (otherwise known as 'seizing'), and you won't be able to use it for dipping!

I dipped the stick in chocolate much deeper than I normally would for cake pops, because I needed to put the stick in much deeper to support the length of the Oscar pop.

Oscar pop stuck with the stick and ready to dunk!

Dip, dip, da dip dip dip!

Ah! A freshly dipped Oscar pop!

Once it's dry, it doesn't matter if you end up with swirling on the coating. All of the pops will be dusted with gold, and you won't be able to see this.

Now for the fun part: making them gold! Here I'm using a dry brush to dust the gold on them.

A finished dry dusted Oscar pop, gilded and ready to be adored!

Here is a comparison of what the luster dust looks like when applied two different ways. On the left, the luster dust was applied with a dry brush. On the right, I used a 'wet' application by combining vodka and luster dust to create a 'paint'.

I think the 'paint' works well in small applications, but for all-over coverage, I don't recommend it. It ends up all splotchy. Still, a unique look, though!

Here you can compare all three- undusted, dusted, and painted.

So pretty, and almost too nice to eat!

Think of how great you'll make your Academy Awards party guests feel when you present them with their very own Oscar! Make these Oscar pops the hit of your next Academy Awards party!

Tangled Rapunzel Tower Birthday Cake

2012-02-08T02:11:00.000-05:00

Happy 4th birthday to my daughter!

As per her request, I had to make her a special cake. She told me that she wanted a tall cake with fondant (yep, she knows and loves fondant!). And it had to have a princess on it. And it had to be Rapunzel (from the Disney movie, Tangled). I told her yes, I could make that.

Yikes! No WAY! What was I thinking?! I couldn't believe I had told my almost-four-year-old that I could make something like that. I had no idea how to make it, and didn't know if I could find the time to do it. Well, as most of you moms out there know, where there's a will, there's a way. And my will was looking up at me with her big blue-gray eyes, saying "Please, Mommy!". Ah, the things we do for our kids! So I decided that I would make this cake happen, even if I didn't know what I was doing.

I took a screenshot of the tower from Tangled (the photo on the left) to use as my reference point. I also found some great tower cakes at cakecentral.com that inspired me, too. There are some really creative people out there!

I began with making fondant/gumpaste flowers. Lots of them in pink, purple, fuchsia, and yellow. And in different sizes. I made a slew of tiny yellow dots for the centers of the flowers. I also made lots of green leaves.

I am a huge fan of these flower cutout tools!

Allowing the flowers to dry in my flower former.

Yep. There's enough pink flowers here!

Now for the green leaves.

I really like the contrast of the green and purple here.

Here is a flower with the yellow dot placed in the middle. So cute!

Now for the fondant to cover the cakes. I really like how the green gel coloring swirls in the white fondant. It reminds me of marble (stone).

And after about 10 minutes of kneading, the fondant is a nice shade of green.

Now I need gray fondant, so I add some black gel coloring to white fondant. Again, I love how the swirling patterns make this look like marble! I must make a marble cake soon.

And again, after about 10 minutes of kneading, I have gray fondant.

Looks like a rock! But much more tasty, and not nearly as hard. :)

Now for the cake. I used a 9" cake pan for this tier. When stacked like this, it's a little over 4" tall.

Applying the crumb coat.

Fully crumb coated and ready for the fondant.

I had two portions of green fondant. One for the lower tier, and another for the upper tier.

My fondant draped over my cake.

Smoothed on.and nicely fitted. See that wad of fondant in the front of the cake? I used it to help smooth the fondant onto the cake. For me, it actually worked better than using the fondant smoother. The smoother is great for creating a crisp finish at the bottom. The chunk of fondant helps to create a nice finish all over.

Using a pizza cutter, I trimmed away the excess fondant. Tier One is ready to decorate!

Here's my gray fondant, rolled out. I'm using a cobblestone fondant impression mat to create a stone effect here.

All done and ready to be trimmed so I can put it on the cake.

And here is the stone trim applied. I glued it on with a Gum-Tex and water solution. It worked perfectly to keep the fondant in place.

Now comes some fun decorating! Using the same Gum-Tex glue solution, I glued on the flowers and leaves (as well as the yellow centers) around the cake. So pretty!

All done! I could have stopped making the cake here, but my daughter wanted a TALL cake. So I kept going.

Tier two added. This was a 6" cake, covered with fondant in the same way as the first tier.

Tier two covered in flowers. Should I stop here? Nay, I say! A tall cake it must be!

So I kept going.

Bring on the Rice Krispie Treats! The perfect sculpting tool. I used two large bags of rice krispies to make the tower and the room/roof on top of it.

First, to make a tower base. A large wooden dowel was necessary to stabilize it. In hindsight, I would have made the base of the tower more narrow; it would have held up just fine as a narrower shape because of the wooden dowel I put inside of it. And a narrower tower would have meant less weight on the cake. With all the fondant on the tower, it made the cake really, really heavy!

The tower room and roof sculpted.

All together now! Remember, the base tier of this cake was 4", the top tier was 3". I forgot to measure how tall this tower was, but believe me, it was TALL.

I let the tower rest on its side overnight off the cake, and I also disassembled the top and roof so they could fully dry as well. It is important that these are nice and hard before adding the weight of the fondant.

NOTE: Looking back, I could have easily made this tower days before I made the cake, especially since it wasn't intended to be eaten. I could even have completely decorated it as well. I would have had more enthusiasm and paid better attention to detail. Dang. Something to remember for my next big project!

I had originally placed tower off to the side of the top tier (as seen here), and I placed five support dowels under it. But I think I made the support dowels a little too short, because after about an hour, I could see the fondant beginning to buckle on the side of the top tier. If you look closely, you can see the slight dents in the fondant on the top of the cake. This was about 30 minutes after I placed the tower on top.

In later photos, you can see that I readjusted the tower to the center of the cake, and I replaced the short dowels with longer ones to more adequately support the weight of the tower. I hid the holes I made in the fondant from the short dowels on the side with lots of buttercream 'grass'. It worked, and I learned a valuable lesson about cake engineering!

Here's how I made the tiles for the roof. I mixed two colors of blue fondant and rolled it out. Then I cut different rectangle sizes out to create tiles for the tower's roof. No need for perfection on the sizes of the tiles here!

I added a thin layer of frosting underneath so it would all stay in place.

I used a brick fondant mold and white fondant to create the covering for the tower and the tower's room at the top.

I painted 'dirt' with airbrush color onto the tower with brown color first. Then I piped on 'vines' and leaves.

At the top of the tower, I drew on windows and wood accents as a guide for where I needed to place my fondant details. And when I say "drew", I actually mean "painted". I used a food-safe paintbrush and airbrush food color to mark up the places where I wanted windows and trim.

I piped in some 'grass' at the bottom of the tower.

Here I added some 'wood' detail with brown fondant, but it's still coming along.

More detail.

Still coming along!

And here is the front of the tower!

I'll be honest here. I could have done much, much more detail work to this tower, but I ran out of energy and time. So while I feel that I could have done a better job with this, I think it doesn't look all that bad. Especially considering that I've never made ANYTHING like this before.

Oh, and did my daughter like this tall, tall Rapunzel tower cake? Yes! It took me almost four days to create, and I was exhausted at the end, but it was totally worth it to see her expression. Would I do it again? For her, absolutely.

And please note that the "Tangled" figurines on the cake were purchased and are not edible. I would never had the time to make the figures by hand!

Hope you enjoyed the pics!

Fondant Rainbow Confetti Cupcakes

2012-02-06T18:59:00.000-05:00

In honor of my daughter's 4th birthday, I made a really, really tall Rapunzel Tower cake (modeled after the Disney movie, Tangled). It took a few days to make, and I will be posting pics and a tutorial of what I did and how I did it.

So why am I mentioning this?

Because I made a HUGE amount of fondant for the project. And as if I don't have enough to do, I decided to make a batch of cupcakes for my daughter to take to school on her birthday. I figured that I could use some of my homemade marshmallow fondant to make some unique and adorable birthday cupcakes!

By the way, these cupcakes were a huge hit with the preschoolers AND the teachers. The kids loved the colors and taste of the fondant, and the teachers loved that these cupcakes weren't a messy treat! The teachers also commented on how tasty these were as well.

Marshmallow fondant is so incredibly easy, easy, easy to make. Here's the recipe that I use from allrecipes.com. http://allrecipes.com/recipe/marshmallow-fondant/

Marshmallow Fondant (also known as MMF):
Ingredients

1/4 cup butter
1 (16 ounce) package miniature marshmallows
4 tablespoons water
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 pounds confectioners' sugar, divided

Directions

Place the butter in a shallow bowl, and set aside.
Place the marshmallows in a large microwave-safe bowl, and microwave on High for 30 seconds to 1 minute to start melting the marshmallows. Carefully stir the water and vanilla extract into the hot marshmallows, and stir until the mixture is smooth. Slowly beat in the confectioners' sugar, a cup at a time, until you have a sticky dough. Reserve 1 cup of powdered sugar for kneading. The dough will be very stiff.
Rub your hands thoroughly with butter, and begin kneading the sticky dough. As you knead, the dough will become workable and pliable. Turn the dough out onto a working surface dusted with confectioners' sugar and continue kneading until the fondant is smooth and no longer sticky to the touch, 5 to 10 minutes.
Form the fondant into a ball, wrap it tightly in plastic wrap, and refrigerate overnight. To use, allow the fondant to come to room temperature, and roll it out onto a flat surface dusted with confectioners' sugar.

I don't necessarily refrigerate mine. I sometimes wrap it, put it in a Ziploc bag, and just leave it on the counter if I need it right away.

Okay, so I had to first have cupcakes. I used a funfetti cake mix, and colored it pink. The funfetti still showed up in the cake. So cute for a little girl's birthday!

Next, I had to prepare all the colored dots. I rolled out several different colors of fondant, one color at a time. I took a round piping tip and pressed out lots of small round circles. It helps to dust the top of the fondant first (I use powdered sugar), then you can cut out up to seven dots before popping them out of the piping tip. I used a toothpick to pop them out, and they all came out perfect (and I saved time rather than cutting and popping out the circles one at a time). I kept them covered with plastic wrap so they wouldn't dry out.

Next I took a large piece of white fondant and rolled it out. I pressed each dot individually into the fondant randomly. Then I took a fondant smoother and pushed down to embed the dots into the fondant. If you use a fondant roller or a rolling pin, you run the risk of turning your perfect circles into ovals. And it's not that difficult to just press down, anyways!

I then took a circle cutter that was roughly the same size as the cupcake tops and cut out the circles that will cover the cupcakes. And this is what they looked like!

And what a mess I made with the confectioner's sugar!

Once the fondant circles were complete, I took a little cream cheese frosting and spread it on top of the cupcake. This is so the fondant would have something to stick to.

And then I dropped a fondant circle on top, smoothing it on to ensure good adhesion.

I really had a good time making these. I actually like working with fondant more than plain old frosting now!

Here is the batch by the time I finished. So cute and yummy too!

Merry Christmas Tree Cake Pops

2011-12-25T01:11:00.000-05:00

It's Christmas Eve, so I'm a tad late in posting this. But what the heck- better late than never! Happy Holidays with Christmas Tree cake pops!

I began with shaping the cake balls into cone or bell shapes in green and red colors. Fun and festive!

Here we've got cake pops in the shape of cones, dipped in green candy coating. Nice thing about making tree cake pops is that you don't have to be perfectly smooth with the coating on the initial dip since you will be making it look 'branchy'.

To make branchy trees on the cake pops: the trusty toothpick.

Dip the toothpick in your melted candy coating. This works best if the coating is thick or slightly cooled.

Gently dab on the coating onto the cake pop.

Here is what it looks like after a few dabs. Keep this up until it is completely coated.

You should have something like this when you're done. (Sorry about the blurry photo!)

Small forest of cake pop trees!

And inside... bright festive red!

To decorate, use some extra melted candy coating to glue the decorations into place. I attached a small star on the top of each tree, and mini candy canes, mini gingerbread men, and mini red holly berries.

For other trees, I dusted some powdered sugar onto them before decorating to simulate snow.

And now I will take my leave here... time to spend some quality time with my own family!

Happy holidays to everyone, and happy cake popping!

Toy Story Tiered Fondant Cake

2011-11-06T18:52:00.000-05:00

I ventured into new territory this week for my son's 2nd birthday: tiered fondant cake. It took me three days to make, but totally worth it for my little man. This was my very first tiered cake EVER, so I'm happy that it didn't fall apart on me! I was terrified when putting it together, but it was easier than I expected, to be honest.

He's crazy about the Toy Story movies- especially Buzz Lightyear. When he saw the cake, he began squealing, and all he wanted to do was get really, really close to it. I ended up having to put it back in the refrigerator before the guests arrived- he kept wanting to touch it all! Only a few minutes after the guests arrived, we lit his two candles and cut the cake just so he could play with all the cake and toys on it. A little backwards for a birthday party timing-wise, but it was all about making Cameron happy on his big day. :)

The cake and frosting were store bought mixes. The fondant and gumpaste were home made. The characters were store-bought, and completely made the cake.

The stars were made with Wilton's star fondant cutters, but you could use any old star shaped cookie cutter for the same effect. For the ones on the dark blue cake, I used yellow fondant and brushed orange matte edible dust on the tops of them. If you look at the stars on the wallpaper in Andy's room in Toy Story 2 and Toy Story 3, you will notice that they have this type of coloring on them.

For the four stars on the wires at the top of the cake, they were also made with yellow fondant, but I added some Gum-Tex to harden them up a bit. I rolled the fondant to about 1/4" thick so I could push the floral wire through them and still have stability of the decoration. I brushed a gold iridescent edible luster dust on them to give them a shimmer effect.

The "Happy Birthday" lettering was made with cookie cutter letter shapes, using a fondant and Gum-Tex mixture. The white clouds on the base layer of the cake and the "Cameron" lettering were cut by hand. Using a similar font as in the Toy Story title, I printed onto paper two copies in the size I wanted of "Cameron". I then cut out the letters- one set of letters was of the larger blue parts, and the other set of letters was of the smaller yellow letters. After that, I rolled out my fondant to about 1/4 thick, and let it set for a bit to harden up just slightly (easier to cut!). Using an exacto knife, I carefully traced the fondant letters around my paper template letters. I then used a bit of water to glue the blue and yellow letters together, and let them set out overnight to harden up. The same method was used for the number 2 at the top of the cake.

The rope detailing at the base of the top two tiers was created using a clay extruder (used only for fondant, of course!). I used a clover-shaped piece to get the initial long shape, then gently twisted the length into a rope shape. It was easy and quick, and made for a nice finish to the edges of the cakes.

I found a great rolled fondant recipe on allrecipes.com, which I used for the fondant and gumpaste. The fondant was a breeze to roll out and place on the cake because I used a product called The Mat. Check it out in action on Youtube here. The Mat has squashed my fears of getting fondant on a cake! I'm so confident with my fondant skills now, I can't wait for another big event to make a cake for!

Black Cat and Ghost Cake Pops

2011-10-29T23:46:00.000-04:00

Halloween is just around the corner, and it's time for more Halloween-themed cake pops! Bring on the black cats and ghosts- cake pops, that is!

The ghosts are very easy to make. Once you have your initial cake balls ready, simply form them into a ghost shape. Then dip in white candy coating, let dry, then draw on their faces with an edible ink pen.

The black cat cake pops take more effort. Begin with your basic cake balls, and grab a few bags of black candy melts. The melts I found weren't in the best condition, and they looked like they had melted a bit in the bag. But what the heck, the cake pops would still taste good, so I decided to use them anyways.

Here are my cake balls (already chilled), and candy corn (cut down a little bit) for the ears.

Dip each piece of candy corn into melted candy coating. Then insert them into the cake ball, waping away the excess candy coating. Let set.

This reminded me of Christmas, I don't know why!

Here are the cat cake pops after dipping in the black candy coating. I used Easter Egg sprinkles for the eyes, and candy heart sprinkles for the noses. The orange 'bows' were two pumpkin sprinkles glued on their sides.

The swirling patterns on some of the cake pops was due to the fact that the candy melts had previously been melted (in the bag). I actually like how the swirls work on these- it looks more cat-like to me!

Here's how I added the collars to the cat cake pops. Take some melted candy coating on a toothpick and spread it around the underside of a cake pop.

Slide your gummy life saver over the stick of the cake pop.

Press it gently on the base of the cake pop and let it dry upside down for a few minutes to set. I placed mine a few at a time gently propped up on a clean tea towel before moving back to the styrofoam block.

I used a black edible ink pen to draw in the eyes and make little expressions on the faces. I also glued on a bit of 'bling' onto the collars: a black bat sprinkle.

Here's hoping you have a boo-tiful cake poppin' Halloween!

Chocolate Acorns!

2011-10-28T18:41:00.000-04:00

Okay, so I found myself between cake pop projects (new one coming this weekend!), but I had some energy to make a small treat creation. I saw this idea online, and I had to try it: chocolate acorns!

This is ridiculously easy. Much, much easier than cake pops, and they take far less time. Not only do they taste great, but they look amazing- especially considering how little time they take! Here's what I used:

chocolate kisses for the base (I used the Hershey Aero variety of kisses, because the chocolate isn't very dense)
mini Nutter Butter cookies for the top (you can use Ritz bites, mini Nilla Wafers, or even round pretzel sandwich bites if you want)
mini chocolate chips for the stem on top (you can use regular chocolate chips or small bits of pretzel sticks)

Melt some chocolate in a small dish. Using a toothpick, apply some melted chocolate to the center of the Nutter Butter cookie. Place a mini chocolate chip on the melted chocolate and let dry.

Then take some more melted chocolate on a toothpick and apply it to the Nutter Butter cookie (opposite the side with the mini chocolate chip). Take a chocolate kiss and apply it to the melted chocolate. Let dry.

And voila, you should now have an adorable (and delicious) chocolate acorn. Impress your friends and family at Thanksgiving with this sweet little treat!

Jack-O-Lantern / Halloween Pumpkin Cake Pops

2011-10-26T20:29:00.000-04:00

I've been busy lately with a new obsession of making French macarons. For those of you who are familiar with these little delicacies, you know how amazing they are- amazingly difficult to make, that is! But now I've decided to jump back into familiar- and much easier- territory with cake pops.

I love Halloween! Along with all the decorations I'm building for our haunted house display, I thought it fit to create a batch of pumpkin cake pops- and some of them have become jack-o-lantern cake pops as well. Keep reading to learn how I made these cuties!

I used a spice cake mix for this batch. I made them with a little more frosting than I normally use because I wanted them to be able to hold the ridges that would make them look more pumpkin-like. Here, I used a long bamboo skewer to make my ridges. You could use a lollipop stick, or even a toothpick if you want.

Roll the ball onto the stick several times in different places. You want your indentations to be deep so they show up nicely. When you dip these in the candy coating, the ridges won't seem as prominent. They don't need to be perfect. Think "pumpkin"! Every one of them is quite unique with regards to their form.

Ridged out and ready for the refrigerator. I made the ridges when the cake balls were still soft because it was easier to mold them in this state.

I cut up sour apple straws to make the tops of the pumpkins. I could eat sour apple straws all day long. Sigh. Yum!

I only had white candy melts, so I added orange, yellow, and red oil-based coloring to make the orange candy coating. I added a LOT of coloring. This was a HUGE mistake for me that I will elaborate on later.

Here's a cake ball ready to dip.

Dipping the stick before putting it into the cake ball.

The stick stuck into the cake ball.

Dipping the pop! Try to dip in one quick in and out motion- don't keep dunking or twist it around. You might end up with crumbs in your coating, or your cake ball might even decide to stay for a swim.

Cleanly dipped. See how there is no excess coating around the base of the stick? Make sure you tap off the excess well on these so the ridge detail shows up.

Ah! It's a pumpkin pop!

To add the green stems, take a little extra melted candy coating, and apply it to the top of the pop with a toothpick.

Here's the stem made of sour apple straw!

Stem on! I like that with pumpkin cake pops that if the coating isn't perfect, it still looks great. It makes it look all the more organic, in my opinion.

It's a pumpkin patch of cake pops!

Okay, so if you're still following me, I mentioned earlier how I made a HUGE mistake by adding a boatload of oil-based coloring to my coating. Here it is. Cracking in the coating. Over HALF of my cake pops ended up cracking horribly. The only thing I did differently in this batch than in other batches was that I added an ungodly amount of coloring to it. So avoid this disaster, and buy pre-colored melts if you can. I like adding color to my melts, but usually only do it in small amounts.

I think I also added too much thinning agent (paramount crystals) to my melts. I wanted to have really thin coating so the ridge detail would show up, so I added double the amount of crystals to my melts. Unfortunately, I think I ended up making it much too thin. This combined with the huge amount of extra oil coloring made for a very weak coating- susceptible to cracking. Lesson learned for next time!

And here is a completed jack-o-lantern cake pop. The face was drawn on with an edible ink pen. Very easy, and super cute!

Happy Halloween cake poppin' to everyone!

Rainbow Cake Pops

2011-10-03T22:26:00.000-04:00

I've wanted to try making rainbow cake pops for awhile. My son's preschool teacher is having a birthday tomorrow, so I decided that I would make a rainbow cake pop batch just for her. And lucky you, I took photos along the way to show you how to make these!

Let me begin by warning you that these are labor intensive. Other cake pop designs seem to take a lot less time for me. If you know of a faster way of making these, please let me know. So you think you've got the time to make these? Okay, cool, let's go!

I used a basic 'white' cake mix. I suppose that you could use a yellow cake mix, but I didn't want the colors to get distorted with the yellow base.

You need to bake five different colors of cake. Some people use small loaf pans, and that would work great. I only had cupcake pans available, so that's what I used.

I like using gel food coloring. You don't need a lot of it, and the colors are intense. Here I've prepped five bowls with blue, green, yellow, orange, and red.

No need to show you what white cake batter looks like. The colors are MUCH more interesting, don't you think? They all look so yummy!

Try your best to divide your cake batter into equal amounts so you don't end up with too much of one color. Easier said than done, right?

First batch poured into the cupcake tins and ready for the oven. So pretty! I think I might color cupcakes more often. I ended up making two boxes of cake mix just so I could have an ample amount of each color.

Baked rainbow of cupcakes waiting to be crumbled. I had a great time just looking at the colors. When crumbling your cakes, you will need to wash your hands well to remove crumbs from each color batch. You don't want to mix your colors yet!

I added a heaping teaspoonful of cream cheese frosting to each bowl. Remember to use one spoon per bowl so you don't end up with a mix of crumb colors. And keep each bowl away from the others when mixing to keep the colored crumbs from flying into other bowls.

The whole idea behind making nice looking rainbow cake balls is that your colors should be roughly evenly represented in the ball. So you want to aim for 20% yellow, 20% red, etc. In order to do this, you will need to have lots of smaller "20%" balls already made. I made a really big ball from the crumb/frosting mixture, then pinched off smaller pieces to make into smaller balls. They were about the size of a marble. I mention this because it's a pain in the butt to make tiny balls out of your crumb mixture. Much easier to make a really big cake ball then pinch off what you need. Don't believe me? Try making tiny balls from your cake crumbs! The crumbs just don't stick together well when you're making little balls, and you will waste a lot of time mashing little bits of crumbs together. Trust me.

Here's what I ended up with after working through all the colors. I made about 45 marble-sized cake balls of each color. Like I said, labor-intensive!

Okay, so now you've got your marble-sized colored cake balls. I placed one of each color in a pentagon-shaped formation.

Then I smushed them together.

I will note here that I am a huge fan of the 1971 version of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. As I was making these, I was whisked to the scene about the Everlasting Gobstoppers. They looked quite similar to what's in the photo to the left! Okay, back to the cake pops...

I gently kept working them together until....

Until I got this! A rainbow cake ball!

Working with all these colors reminded me of working with play-dough. That's the kind of consistency you should have.

I dipped them in white candy coating (I use Wilton's Candy Melts with paramount crystals), and covered them in non-pareils of different colors.

Remember that these are going to be for a birthday gift, so they had to be bright and festive!

I decided to choose the blue sprinkled one to test for a bite.

Oooh! What a fun surprise!

Another pop, another bite....

Same pop, another angle. I was really happy about how these turned out!

This last photo was of a pop that my 3 year old daughter was eating. She was thrilled at all the colors inside this cake pop.

Not only are these rainbow cake pops visually stunning, but they taste amazing! I strongly encourage you to give these a try. They're worth the effort. What a great way to bring a sweet rainbow into someone's day!

Pretty Kitty and Tom Cat Cake Pops

2011-08-08T12:24:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago I made Puppy Dog Cake Pops, so naturally I also had to represent cats, too. For your consideration, I present Pretty Kitty and Tom Cat cake pops!

I'm assuming that you already know how to make a basic cake ball. If not, look here. Once you have your cake balls assembled, follow the instructions below.

First you need a bunch of large candy corn. These will be the ears on the cats. Here in the photo to the left, I have used extra pastel candy corn from my cake pop bunny project.

Cut off the wide base of the candy corn so that it makes a rough edge at the bottom. Not only does it make for a proper ear size for the cake ball, but the rough edge allows for better adhesion to the cake ball.

Here I have my chilled cake balls, all of my pre-trimmed candy corn 'cat ears', and a ramekin of extra melted candy coating for 'glue'.

First, dip the end of one of the candy corn pieces into the candy coating.

Then take a cake ball and firmly press the coated end of the candy corn into it. Don't press too deeply or else you may end up cracking the cake ball.

Smooth the coating around the base of the candy corn. It's not entirely necessary, but it will make for a nice finish around the ears when you completely coat the pop.

Here's how it looks with both ears attached.

And here's how a pop looks if you DON'T smooth out the candy coating around the bases of the ears. Kind of lumpy, and it looks unprofessional.

You may be wondering why I didn't place these on the sticks at this stage. After all, it would be much easier to let these dry on sticks rather than on a baking sheet. Well, I like my cake pops to look 'finished', or 'professional'. I'm a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to these!

So, when you put a stick into your cake pop, you need to dip the stick into a bit of candy coating first. As you insert the stick into the cake ball, some of the extra candy coating oozes out and onto the base of the cake ball. When you dip your cake ball immediately after this step, you end up with a nice smooth base around the area of the stick. This is because the still-melted candy coating merges nicely with the fresh melted coating when you dip. If you wait and let the oozed candy coating set around the stick, you end up with a big lumpy area around the base of the stick. Go here to see what I'm talking about (it's from my first cake pop batch, a total failure!). I'm sure that not many people would notice this, or even care! This kind of thing bothers me, though.

I set the entire 'litter' of cat heads into the fridge to set for about 30 minutes. This also helped to re-firm up the cake balls for final dipping.

Here is a cat head being dipped. I found that you can get the best finish of the coating by tilting the pop and tapping off the excess coating at an angle of one of the ears.

Here is the litter, fully coated and ready to decorate!

Read on to see how these cuties came to life!

Here you can see a few stages of decoration. I used candy hearts for the noses. They were attached with some extra melted candy coating.

The face was drawn on with an edible ink pen. I used a gummy Life Saver, attached with extra candy coating, for the collar. I used gummy Life Savers because their soft consistency goes very well with the soft consistency of the cake ball and candy corn. I tried using regular crunchy Life Savers on a prior project, and they didn't work well (taste and texture-wise). These gummy Life Savers were sour. I didn't think the taste would go well with the sweetness of the cake pop, but I was very surprised! The sour of the gummy makes for a really nice finish to the sweetness of the pop! And I like the visual texture of the gummy collar better than the hard Life Saver collar. Looks like it's been 'blinged'!

As I was thinking of 'bling', I thought I could add something more to the collar, so I added a small candy butterfly to it. It worked!

And I also thought of adding something for the 'girl' cat cake pops. Here I added a small butterfly 'bow'. I like this very much!

You can use more colors than just black when drawing your faces. Try changing the eye colors for more appeal!

You can also vary the expressions by changing the eye or mouth shapes. I like including eyebrows for expression as well.

I even used some candy lips on the one to the left, to make the cat look like she was puckering up for a kiss.

The one on the right looks like he's enjoying chewing on something yummy.

All bunched together! Click on the images if you want to see them much bigger.

Punk Chick Pops

2011-08-02T13:09:00.000-04:00

I like creating cake pops that have attitude. My husband requested chick cake pops (his favorite) for his birthday, so I thought I'd make him not just chick cake pops, but Punk Chick Pops!

Okay, so if you want to know about how to make the basic chick pop, go here. If you already know how to make the basic chick cake pop, read on!

I started with Wilton's white candy melts, since I didn't have any of the yellow ones on hand. I also added some paramount crystals to them- if you look closely, you can see them in the photo to the left.

I added yellow and a little orange oil-based coloring to it until I got to the color of yellow I wanted. Here you can see how pretty it is when mixed into the melted candy coating. I should consider dipping pops when the coating looks like this. It would look really cool, I think!

To make these little guys 'punk', I simply added mohawk-style hair to their little heads.

The hair is really, really easy to do. Simply get a toothpick and some extra melted candy coating. As the candy coating begins to cool, it gets thicker. You put a bit of the candy coating on the toothpick, then with upward dabbing motions, you add the hair. I find that it's easiest to work with candy coating that is slightly cool and thick for this effect. If it's too hot, it will be too thin to stand up and make the cool spiky effect.

Another thing I discovered about making these chick cake pops, is that you don't need candy coated chocolate chips for the wings, as suggested in the book Cake Pops by Bakerella. Yes, the candy coated chocolate chips are a great touch, and I like them a lot. But what do you do when your cake pop color and the candy coated chocolate chip colors don't match? Simple! You create the wings with extra candy coating! Using a similar technique as creating 'hair', you can easily dab on two spots of candy coating to resemble 'wings'.

Here you can see the candy coating 'wings' very well. I think they work quite nicely, and the color matches perfectly.

This little guy looks like he's got a breeze blowin' through his hair.

This chick pop has more conservative hair, but is still really happy to be here!

Graduation Cap Cake Pops

2011-07-26T19:23:00.000-04:00

For my niece's graduation from high school, I decided to make a batch of graduation cap cake pops.

I began making the cake balls in a shape just a bit smaller than would fit into a small peanut butter cup mold. These molds are very inexpensive, and if you're making a big batch of this type of cake pop, I highly recommend getting several of them to save time. I just had one, and it made the whole process really long!

It's important to make sure that they fit well within the mold, or else you will end up with messy edges on the cap. These cake balls are a whole lot smaller than normal cake pops are. As a result, one box of cake mix yielded me over seventy (yes, SEVENTY) cake balls for my grad cap cake pops. Since I was mailing these, I didn't think I would need that many. I ended up freezing a bunch of them for a later project.

I completely forgot to take photos of the initial mold process! Basically, you put some melted candy coating into your chocolate mold, about 1/3 the way full (you may need to experiment). Put the cake ball into the mold, and push gently. The coating will work its way up the sides of the mold. Don't put your stick in yet! When you've filled your mold tray, place everything in the freezer for a few minutes so the candy coating can set.

After chilling your molded cake balls, cover the top of the cake balls with extra candy coating. Remember, your cake should fit well within- almost under- the rim of the mold, or else the coating will spill over the sides. Before the candy coating sets, place your stick into the cake ball in the mold. You can see in the photo above how the candy coating spilled along the rim, and caused a messy finish at the edges. Don't worry about the tops not looking finished at this point. They will be covered with a candy coating square.

Another thing I forgot to photograph: how to form the square tops of these! I have a silicone brownie bite tray, which has about 24 small squares in it. I put some melted candy coating into a plastic squeeze bottle, and filled each square with a small amount. I then put them in the freezer to firm up. They popped out very easily, and looked very professional, in my opinion!

Then I took one of the squares, and using some extra melted candy coating, I glued the square to the top of the cake pop. I used a piece of yellow licorice as a tassel, and a yellow M&M as the tassel holder.

Here are the whole batch. These are the school colors for my niece's high school. You could use any color combination, though!

All wrapped up and ready to be shipped across the country. I was told that they were a huge hit at my niece's graduation party!

One note if you're planning on making these: Although they don't look it, these are REALLY time-consuming compared to other cake pops! Make sure you have a few extra hours set aside when making these.

Puppy Dog Cake Pops

2011-07-19T19:11:00.000-04:00

I am a dog person. I have been a professional dog trainer for the past 12 years before taking some time off to raise my two young children. So it made sense for me to make some puppy pops!

I skipped taking pics of how to make the basic cake pops. If you want to learn how to make a basic cake pop, go here.

I dipped the pops in different coatings: white chocolate, milk chocolate, and peanut butter coating. The interior of the cake pops is chocolate. Let me say that the peanut butter coating with the chocolate cake is divine!!

I like the look of a multi-colored dog cake pop. It's so easy to do! First, make your initial dip of the whole cake pop in a coating. Then with another type of coating, be creative and dip your pop at an angle. Here you can see how I dipped at angles on the side of the pop.

And here is a tri-colored pop!

Here is a puppy pop, all dressed up and ready to eat! A red Life Saver was glued with extra melted candy coating on the bottom through the stick to make a collar. In the future, I think I will use gummy Life Savers instead. The regular ones are too crunchy for this treat.

The ears and nose were created with... wait for it...
Tootsie Rolls! Tootsie Rolls can be softened and molded into just about any shape. And they can be made to defy gravity quite well! The white ears are vanilla Tootsie Rolls, the brown nose is a chocolate Tootsie Roll. The rest of the face was drawn on with an edible ink pen.

Ready to see more?

I really like adding different expressions to the faces just by adding eyebrows. Again, as in the photo above, the ears were created with vanilla Tootsie Rolls.

Gravity-defying ears! So cute!

I love how some dogs have a single spot over one eye. The spot could be made with fondant, or, like with this puppy, I used vanilla Tootsie Roll.

So would anyone care to adopt one of these puppy dogs? :)

Skull and Pirate Skull Cake Pops

2011-07-12T18:10:00.000-04:00

One of my Facebook friends (Hi, Wendell!) suggested that I make skull cake pops. I think he was getting tired of seeing all the super cutie cake pops I was making, and wanted to know if I could make something more 'dark'. Why not?

So I started with a red velvet cake mix, tinted with extra red food coloring for that extra 'oomph'.

After the cake was baked, crumbled, cooled, and frosting added, I began to make shapes that roughly resembled skulls.

Can you see the skulls here?

I actually had fun sculpting each little head. They each had their own unique personality, and I hadn't even begun to decorate them yet!

After shaping, I placed them in a refrigerator for a few hours.

Here are the gang after dipping in white candy coating.

Skulls were so dang easy to make. All the features are drawn on with a black edible ink pen. It was fun!

After awhile, I became bored with drawing just a basic skull face, so I got creative and began drawing expressions on them. The shape of the skull reminded me of "The Scream" by Edvard Munch, so
I tried to emulate it on the cake pop.

These guys look afraid of the ones on the left!

Still with my creative juices flowing, I thought I could make pirate skull cake pops out of half of these. An easy dip in red candy coating, and you've got an instant scarf!

On some I added texture with extra coating, using a toothpick. I used a red candy heart on one side to represent a knot. On the other side, near where an ear would be (they're skulls- no ears!), I used a little melted candy coating to glue a yellow star to simulate an earring.

I love how one of these looks terrified of the others.

The gang's all here! Skull pops, and pirate skull pops.

I uploaded some of the photos of this project to Facebook, and I was asked, "Who's In These Photos?", with the skull faces outlined. Gotta love technology!

This is one of my favorite shots from this cake pop project. There's something really satisfying about biting into a skull and seeing RED! Muhahahahahaha!

Colorful Cupcake Cake Pops

2011-07-04T20:26:00.000-04:00

I decided after my last batch of cupcake cake pops that I could do better. Don't get me wrong, they tasted great, and were very cute. But I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so I had to make another batch. I would pay more attention to detail, and experiment with some colors.

In Bakerella's book, Cake Pops (I love this book!), she makes cupcake cake pops with a chocolate base, and a light top. I wanted to mix it up a bit and create a light base and a chocolate or colored top. And to keep it colorful, I used a confetti cake with confetti frosting. It's gonna be a party of pops!

I love how the confetti cake mix looks close up. :)

Here is the cutter I used to make the cupcake bases for each cake ball. It's rather long, but I'm going to show you how I made it work.

This particular cutter is the smallest one from the 11 piece fluted round cutter set by Ateco.

As you can see, it's round at one end, and crimped at the other. I'm going to use the crimped end to make my cupcake base.

You can see how I started with a round ball. It's almost as tall as the cutter.

Shape the ball into a football or potato shape.

Fit the cake spud shape into the cutter from the bottom (this is the round end by my thumb), and push it up until about half is sticking out. I then gently pushed down on the exposed cake ball while holding the cake ball inside of the cutter with my thumb. I gently pushed the cake from the inside so that it would form the shape of the ridges of the cutter. The top I shaped into a mushroom, gently pinching along the sides. I keep mentioning the word gently. It's important or else you'll end up with a mess! When you're happy with your shape, pop the cake up and out with your thumb.

Here is the result! A cute little mini cupcake waiting for dipping.

Are you still with me? Cool- let's keep going!

I think it's important to remember to not mix too much frosting in these. If you look closely, you'll see that this cake pop looks on the dry side. If they are over saturated with frosting, they won't hold their shape well at all, and you'll also find that the pops won't stay on the stick when you dip 'em. That, and too much frosting gives cake pops a mealy texture. I like my cake pops to resemble cake, not mush. That's just me.

Cupcake cake pops are made by performing two separate dips. First dip is the bottom. You hand dip the bottom in your candy coating, knocking off any excess coating as you go. Try to get as much candy coating up to the edge of the 'poofy' part of the cupcake as possible. The cake pop on the right and in the back have good coverage. I missed a few spots on the pop in the middle, and I had to use a toothpick to fill in the gaps. It takes extra time to do this, and it doesn't leave a nice finish.

While the coating is still wet, flip the pop onto its top and stab it with a stick. Make sure you dip the end of the stick in a bit of extra candy coating to make sure you get good adhesion in the cake pop. Let the pops sit and dry before setting them upright.

TIP ALERT! While I was waiting for my pops to finish drying, I needed a way to store my extra candy coating. Never throw out your candy coating- there is always a use for it in some later cake pop creation! I lined a small cookie sheet with plastic wrap.

By the way, when making cupcake cake pops, I use ONLY the little square shaped Ziploc containers. They're great in the microwave, and I've got lots of 'em! I love the deep corners- perfect for dipping half of a cupcake cake pop (you can really see what you're doing, which is necessary for these little guys!).

Pour it on the sheet.

Gently shake the tray to distribute the coating evenly. Let it cool, then lift it out of the tray. Place another piece of plastic on top of it and wrap. You can even fold it in half for storage. I write the date on the wrap (and flavor if it's been flavored). They stack very easily this way. And if you need just a little bit, it's easy to break off a piece and use just what you need.
(End Tip Alert! Now back to the cupcake cake pops!)

Okay, so this pop is ready to get its top dipped. Notice that the bottom has good coating coverage just slightly over the poofy part of the pop. Yay!

Dipped in chocolate, white nonpareils, and a red M&M to finish the top. I find that it's easiest to add the M&M first then sprinkle the nonpareils on. Do this while the coating is still wet or else they won't stick.

Purple top with white nonpareils and a pastel purple M&M. Pastel M&Ms are easy to find around Easter, but can also be found at some bulk candy stores as well.

And bluuue! I love the color of the blue candy coating on these. I also used rainbow sprinkles in this batch. These were really fun to decorate.

I took a bite so you can see what the confetti cake looks like. It was a challenge- eating a cake pop- but know I did it for all of you. I did this several more times to several different pops, but in my excitement, I forgot to photograph them all. Trust me, they were all delish!

Here's what the finished batch looked like!

I'm much happier with this batch than with my previous batch. :)

Hope you have fun making your own cupcake cake pops!

Dreamsicle, Charlie Brown, and Cupcake Cake Pops

2011-06-28T01:33:00.000-04:00

In today's blog, I'm throwing in some extra creations that I made one of. Yes, a single, unique cake pop of its own design. I was making a batch of cake pops with an orange-flavored coating and vanilla cake. A friend suggested that I make a Dreamsicle cake pop (orange sherbert with vanilla ice cream inside). I had some extra coating, but not much, so this is what I came up with!

I made a shape like a Dreamsicle with the cake ball. Then dipped!

A bite taken. And it does resemble a Dreamsicle. I would have made more if I had more candy coating available at the time. Must make more of these soon. Yum!

Okay, and I made one Charlie Brown. This was in a batch of South Park cake pops. I don't know how I thought of Charlie Brown amongst a group of foul-mouthed fourth graders! But the round flesh-colored head was screaming for a Charlie Brown doodle. So there ya go.

Now on to the Cupcake Cake Pops!

I used strawberry cake mix, and a flower-shaped cookie cutter. The cutter was about 1.5 inch across, and for me, it was too big. But I made it work. I ended up with fewer cake pops, but they were bigger than what I normally make.

So the first step is to hand dip the bottoms of the cupcakes in coating (I used chocolate here). Try to cover as much of the bottom as you can while dipping. While the coating is still wet, put the stick in, and allow the coating to dry upside down.

After they dry, I put them in styrofoam to save space.

Next, I dipped the tops in pink candy coating, making sure to cover all exposed areas. I used a toothpick to help fill in small gaps. While still wet, I added a red M&M, and then topped with rainbow sprinkles.

You can also add white nonpariels, and they look great!

Going....

Just about gone! Let me say that the strawberry cake and chocolate coating tasted amazing!

Assembled in a basket, and ready for Mother's Day!

Cake Pop Insanity!

Butterfly Sandwiches

Planet Jupiter Cake (Spherical Concentric Layer cake)

Directions

Troubleshooting Cake Pops

Problem

Solution

Cake balls won't hold a ball shape.

Cake balls won't stick together.

Cake ball falls off the stick.

My candy coating/ chocolate coating is thick and lumpy.

The coating on my cake pops has cracked.

Oil is seeping through the coating on my cake pop.

Swedish Fish Candy Sushi Treats (No Bake!)

Tiered Fondant Birthday Present Cake

Directions

Mother's Day Rose Cupcakes

Springtime Easter Cupcakes with Fondant Animals

Directions

Rainbow Inside the Gold: Lucky St. Patrick's Day Cake Pops

Happy Birthday to ME! (or How I Made My Own Birthday Cake)

Academy Awards Oscar Cake Pops

Tangled Rapunzel Tower Birthday Cake

Fondant Rainbow Confetti Cupcakes

Directions

Merry Christmas Tree Cake Pops

Toy Story Tiered Fondant Cake

Black Cat and Ghost Cake Pops

Chocolate Acorns!

Jack-O-Lantern / Halloween Pumpkin Cake Pops

Rainbow Cake Pops

Pretty Kitty and Tom Cat Cake Pops

Punk Chick Pops

Graduation Cap Cake Pops

Puppy Dog Cake Pops

Skull and Pirate Skull Cake Pops

Colorful Cupcake Cake Pops

Dreamsicle, Charlie Brown, and Cupcake Cake Pops