Big Helper

We're all glad JR is back from his school and deployment, but I think Zane especially was craving some time with Daddy.



And yes, JR is doing his wood working in my living room. It's a good thing he cleans up after himself.

Lopsided Cupcake Cake

I made my eighth cake this week. Be warned: this is a long post. My friend Grace was planning a "Mad Hatter Tea Party" themed birthday for her daughter. She had seen this cupcake pan in the store, but she wanted it to be lopsided to fit with the craziness of the theme. She also loves fondant, but we both thought covering the whole thing in fondant wouldn't look right so the bottom is in fondant and the top is iced with buttercream.

So first (Monday night) I baked the cupcake cake and 2 9-inch cakes in red velvet. I didn't need 9-inch cakes, but that was the size pan I had available. I tried to go get some more, but the Exchange only had 9s and 10s. After I took them out and they cooled a bit, I wrapped them well and put them in the freezer.

Tuesday, I took them out of the freezer and started cutting away. First I made sure all my cakes were flat. Then I placed one of the 9-inch cakes on top of the lower portion of the cupcake. I angled to top and cut a flat circle out of the middle to support the top of the cake. I also cut channels in the sides to match the cupcake.

These are the two separate pieces.

I thought that was quite a bit of cake on the bottom so I cut the lower piece in half and "glued" it back together with some white buttercream.

Then I wrapped up the bottom of the cupcake and put it in the fridge.

I took the top of the cupcake and the other 9-inch cake out of the freezer. I cut the bottom of the 9-inch to fit on top of the other 9-inch cake. That way the top of the cake would be supported and would actually be flat on bottom even if it looked lopsided. I cut the top flat and cut the sides at an angle to line up with the top of the cupcake piece and to overhang the other 9-inch.  I then "glued" the top 9-inch to the cupcake top, wrapped them up, and put them back in the freezer. I took the bottom of the cupcake out of the fridge, added the lower 9-inch to it (with icing) and then re-wrapped it and put it back in the freezer.

Wednesday I made some white buttercream and frosted the entire bottom portion of the cake to prep it for the fondant.

I had intended to smooth the fondant into the indentions to keep the cake looking like it was a cupcake in a paper liner. That didn't work. Since it's a Mad Hatter theme, I decided to paint the fondant. I forgot to take a picture of the cake before I started painting so this picture has two stripes on it already.

I wanted it to show the brushstrokes and have vivid colors to be reminiscent of the Disney movie. I chose green and yellow, as he has a yellow coat and green shoes, pants, and hat. I decided to do stripes to help it look like a paper liner. Here it is completely painted.

I'm afraid it looks a bit weird. I hope it looks better when it's all put together. Well...I don't know how likely that is. It's going to have bright pink icing on top and blue "sprinkles." I just hope Grace and Celeste like it.

Thursday morning I put the top of the cake on, frosted it bright pink, and put on the sprinkles. They're just white chocolate and blue food coloring poured onto a sheet and then cut out with a circle cutter.

Here's the finished product: one Mad Hatter lopsided cupcake cake.

Puzzler

Zane likes puzzles. Here are a few pictures of him doing his first 100-piece puzzle. He needed a little help to get going so I showed him how to do the border first and then the middle pieces, but he did most of the work himself.

Another Baby Shower Cake

This cake was made for a sister in my ward named Correna. She gave birth to her third child, a little girl named Zoey.  We weren't sure if there was going to be a shower or not, as she gave birth just a few days before the shower and was released at the time the shower was scheduled to start. We still had the shower; she was just a bit late. I made her cake after looking at a few pictures she had sent me. Each cake I make, since I've only made a few so far, gives me something new to try. When I made this one, there was no fondant on the island so I was forced to try homemade marshmallow fondant. I've been wanting to try it, but I didn't have much of a choice. I did have one box of premade fondant in my cabinet, but it wouldn't be enough for the whole cake. Correna attended Melanie's shower and liked the idea of chocolate for one layer and marble for the other.

This picture is just the cuttings, obviously. I, again, had forgotten to take pictures until JR reminded me. The bottom layer was marble and was supposed to be covered in chocolate fondant with circles in different shades of pink. 

The fondant I made turned out just fine, but when I added the chocolate, it all messed up. I gave up after a while and just mixed some chocolate with the fondant I had in my cabinet. Thank goodness I had it.

 Here it is after I trimmed the fondant and attached the circles.

 The top layer was supposed to be a marbled layer with white and two different shades of pink. Here's me mixing one of the pinks into the fondant. I really don't know why I took a picture of this. It looked cooler in person, I guess.

It turned out really well until I put it on the cake and smoothed it down. Apparently marshmallow fondant is more malleable than the store-bought stuff. When I smoothed it on the cake, I mushed all the colors together. It didn't turn out how I wanted, but it still looked okay.

I made roses out of the same fondant and put them on top. Then I added some leaves and white flowers as well.

Then I added a ribbon to the bottom of each layer. Here's the finished product.

Melanie's Baby Shower Cake

So I actually made two cakes last week. I showed a friend here how to make the Lego cake. Then I made a cake for Melanie's baby shower. I found the little teddy bear mold from Wilton and made one to show Melanie. She liked it so I decided to use it for her shower cake. First, I made a base cake. She wanted a marble cake so I got a Fudge Marble mix and then covered the 13x9 with white fondant.


Next I made the two teddy bears. Since I couldn't really marble the bears I made one Yellow and the other Chocolate Fudge. I had forgotten to take pictures of them until they were half frosted. JR called about that time and insisted that I take pictures of the process because he likes to see them. Here are the bears with just black icing.

The bears weren't complicated or difficult, but they took a lot longer than I expected. My original plan was to have at least one of them holding a baby blanket. I would post a picture of the cake that gave me the idea, but Blogger won't let me. It's called "Off to Dreamland" on the Wilton website. But when I realized how long it took to frost them, I decided it wasn't worth it to try to figure out the blanket. I didn't want to get to the shower with an unfinished cake because I started a project that was too big. If I had done it before and knew what I was doing, maybe, but I would have been figuring it out as I went and didn't want to give Melanie an ugly cake. A simple-looking cake I could handle.

I did try something else that was new, though. I tried to paint the fondant. I made little balls of fondant and marked lines on them with a toothpick. I then used a brush and food coloring to paint them just like I had read about online. Unfortunately, I did not do enough research first. The food coloring doesn't dry on its own. You have to mix it with alcohol and then let it evaporate out. It takes all the moisture with it so it looks like you've painted with water colors. I went to the Shoppette to buy a small (i.e., hotel fridge sized) bottle of vodka because I know vodka dries odorless. I don't know about other alcohols so I wanted vodka. What I learned was that they don't sell little bottles of alcohol here. They only sell big ones. I didn't want a huge bottle of alcohol in my house so I just decided to do something else. I kneaded the balls until the colors blended together. Here's what they looked like while I was painting them.

For the border around the bottom I made some of the letter blocks, but again, because of the paint drying problem, I didn't put letters on all of them. I also made two larger blocks to go on the top of the cake. Melanie and Victor, at that point, still hadn't decided on names for the boys. The doctors call them "Baby A" and "Baby B" so those were the letters I put on the big blocks. While I was at the BX (base exchange) I saw a picture frame that said, "Twins are love times two." I thought it was cute so I wrote that on the little blocks around the bottom. Between the blocks I piped some buttercream frosting.

Here's the finished cake:

 Congratulations, Melanie! (and Victor!)

Smart, Talented, and Blessed Boys

Zane drew this picture this morning. It looks like what he says it is. This is a "Sun Person" standing on a "clump" (which he says means "dirt") and jumping rope. It amazes me some of the things he comes up with when I've given him absolutely no direction. He's definitely got his daddy's creativity (and randomness).

Nat has started showing some analytical skills. He sits in the play area and explores the toys. When I took this picture he was sitting at the "bang, bang," as Zane called it, and was slowly pushing the pegs in and pulling them out over and over again. JR pointed out to me that the colored pegs were placed symmetrically. I think that means someone else has inherited his parents' OCD tendencies.

JR graduated this week from the first portion of his school. He had the highest score in his class, but due to a technicality, he is not the Honor Graduate. I'm proud of him for having the highest score, though. He apparently has some nice guys in the class with him. When this guy found out JR was going to be alone for Thanksgiving he told JR to load his bike in the guys truck and then took him home to Quantico for Thanksgiving. I'm so thankful that there's someone there to take care of him and that he won't be alone! I love blessings!

Nat's First Birthday

Here are some pics of Nat with his first birthday cupcake. At first he just looked at it. "Mom, what is this thing? What am I supposed to do with this?" He figured it out, though.

Ooooooh, Aaaaaah

Me likey! Maybe CPHS will send me some more reports... lots more reports.

Cake 4 - Star Wars a.k.a. Some Lessons Learned

So I learned a lot of lessons with this one. I was told to make a Star Wars cake. I couldn't be chocolate or lemon and was supposed to have cream cheese icing. It also had to use these Star Wars toys.
I gave some suggestions, and Sharon (the mom of the birthday girl) chose red velvet cake. I started by baking two 15x11 red velvet cakes. I cut off a little of one of the sides and put it on the end to make it a long, narrow cake. I then iced it very thinly to keep the crumbs in. Lesson 1: I don't like red velvet cake. It turned everything red! It washed right off, but it was annoying. I, stupidly, was afraid it would dye everything red. It didn't. It also didn't transfer well. I don't know if it's just drier or what, but the top layer cracked to pieces when I put it on the lower level. I had to do some careful piecing to get it all flat. (It was that or make a whole new one at 9 p.m.)
 
Next I made a two-layer round cake and iced it just like the 15x11. It turned out much better.

Here I got distracted and forgot to take more pictures of the process. So you just get to listen to me describe it all. I separated the icing into different portions. I dyed some light blue, some dark blue, some gray, and some green. Half the 15x11 (which was not really those dimensions anymore) was iced in white, just thicker than before so it would actually cover the red cake. The other half was covered in the lighter green icing. The round cake was three different colors. I made half the side white and the other half light blue. The top was dark blue (it actually turned out kind of purple, but it looked okay once it set). During this icing process I learned Lesson 2: I don't like cream cheese frosting. It gets too soft too quickly. It's a pain to make it do what you want. It wasn't awful, just not as easy as buttercream. I also learned Lesson 3: Black food coloring gives everything a slightly purple tint. If you want black, you need to put cocoa or something in the icing too. I'm told that when it dries the light purple will turn gray. I think it still looked purple, but I also saw it before it dried so that might have skewed my view.

The round cake was placed on top of the sheet cake with the white sides together. I added details to the lower cake by using black piping gels to draw a doorway on the white so it looked like the inside of a ship where the Storm Trooper Commander Fil could fight Obi-Wan Kenobi. On the other side I put in some French Vanilla Piroulines. I leaf tipped some leaves on the Piroulines so they would look like trees. I then stuck Anakin Skywalker and Stap into the grass so it would look like he was flying through that world where the Ewoks live (with a few less trees, obviously). On the top of the round I placed a plain Hershey bar that had been iced gray to make a platform across the middle of the cake. Then I put white lines on the dark blue to make the scene where Luke fights Darth Vader. Sorry I don't have a picture of this. I really should have taken one.

To cover the seem in the middle of the cake where the colors changed, I made a sugar cookie in the shape of the Star Wars logo. I made it the size I wanted it. I forgot it would expand in the oven. Here's what the huge thing looked like.

I iced the letters to make them stand out a bit, then I propped it in front of the cake with a small piece of cake board to help keep it from cracking. Here's the finished cake. You can't really see any of the details behind the mammoth cookie. Sorry again.
So I learned a lot. I don't like red velvet. I don't like cream cheese frosting (at least not for decorating). I don't like black food coloring. I did enjoy making the cake, though, if for no other reason than I learned a lot. Now I know, right? Besides, Stevie liked it, and that's all that really matters.

Update: Here's a link to Sharon's blog. She has a couple better pictures of the cake.
http://werewildwithpottywords.blogspot.com/2010/10/birthday-baby.html

My Silly Boys

The other day I decided to be nice and make muffins for breakfast. I made orange muffins with chocolate chips in them. I thought the orange needed to be stronger. Apparently Zane liked them.
 

This morning JR got Nat out of his crib, as I was already downstairs when he woke up. Nat has this thing where if he's playing and finds a pacifier, he will spit out the one in his mouth in order to have the new one he found. He's changed his MO. Now he just uses them both at the same time.

 My boys are silly. I'm going to claim they get it from their father. It's not like he makes that hard to believe.