A Sad Kangaroo Leaves America

At the beginning of this school year, I met an awesome Australian exchange student named Caspar.  Now, unfortunately, is his time to go back to that strange land with it's weird animals.  I promised to make him a cake before he left, so, in order to commemorate his return back to his homeland, I made, with the help of my friend John, a sad kangaroo holding an American flag.  It took us a total of six hours to make the cake, but that was partially due to us only having one 8 inch round cake pan to bake all of four cakes.



Here's the all put together kangaroo at the going away party crying and holding it's American flag.

It was received with amazement by my Australian friend who will be missed by all of us Americans.

 We started by leveling all the cakes and then started stacking.

We used a combination of vanilla and almond frostings to frost the all cakes.  

As you can see, we used a mixture of cake types including chocolate, funfetti, and strawberry to make it neapolitan.  The colored frosting is from another project that I made while waiting for all the cake to bake off.

Next I started carving out the shape of the kangaroo.

Next we made legs, a tail, and the head and neck out of rice krispie treats.

Next we frosted the body.  We didn't have enough table room to roll out enough fondant to cover the entire cake with head on, so we covered this part, and then the top and patched them together.

We had some trouble keeping the head standing up, but after adding more internal support, the head successfully stayed up without the supporting stick you see.  The baby joey was made out of pure fondant.  Note, brown is a difficult color to achieve from white fondant and requires copious amounts of food dye only to have it look like a giant pile of...well, you know.

Here is a back view.

An Apple a Day

An apple a day keeps the doctor away, and finals blues away, and not having it be your birthday yet blues.  For my friend's birthday, I made her some apple looking cupcakes (design courtesy of What's New Cupcake?).  Interestingly enough, she was sick, so I had a hard time getting them to her.  I started by just making chocolate cupcakes using a box mix.  Next I made homemade frosting and dyed it red, or as close to red as I could get which was more like a darker pink.

Can you spot the real apple?












I had some trouble with the methods described in the What's New Cupcake? book, so I just cut a hole in the top of the cupcake and frosted over it.

Here's a side view of the cupcake.

Next I dipped the cupcakes in red sprinkles to evenly coat all the frosted area.

And then it looks just like this.

This next step is pretty difficult, or at least it was when I was showing my boyfriend how to do it:
Step one: get a tootsie roll
Step two: throw tootsie roll on the ground (as this happened accidentally)
Step three: get a new tootsie roll
Step four: pull the tootsie roll in half
Step five: shape one half of the tootsie roll into an apple stem
My boyfriend questioned the waste involved in throwing the first tootsie roll on the ground.  You can skip that step if you have more skill than me at pulling the tootsie rolls apart

The last step would be to add a leaf using green tootsie roll to some of the cupcakes.

Meta Cupcakes

It's already late February and way past time that I've updated this blog.  Unfortunately, one of the reasons I haven't updated is because I haven't made anything recently.  My plans to make Valentine's day cupcakes were foiled by a host of midterms and lab reports and other un-fun projects.  Also, the only birthday during this month that I had a chance to celebrate was my own, and, well, it kind of sucks to make your own birthday cake.  So, instead of posting something new that I've made, I'm going to post my super secret birthday cake surprise that my friends made for me.  They couldn't decide on what type of cake to make me, so instead they made cupcakes with miniature meta designs of cakes that I've made on top.  The designs are made of food dyed almond paste (yummy!).  It took me a little while to figure out which cake they all referred to, so as a fun game, see if you can guess which cupcake stands for what cake.  I'll post the answers at the bottom of the blog.

Number 1

Number 2

Number 3

Number 4

Number 5

Number 6

Number 7

Number 8 (two in the middle)

Number 9 (one on the right)

Number 10 (the one not seen in any other pictures above)

That is all the cupcakes so, make your guesses now.  I'll add some more photos and then put the answers at the end for you all to check.

The answers:

Number 1: Cakes from the past: part 1, owls!

Number 2: Shark Attack and Ocean Themed cupcakes

Number 3: Cakes from the past: part 3, Adam's dinosaur cake

Number 4: The Golden Snitch

Number 5: Saturn cake

Number 6: Cakes from the past: part 2, the pumpkin patch

Number 7: Travis's Birthday/The Return from Indonesia

Number 8: Mrs. Helgevold's birthday surprise or sunflower cupcakes

Number 9: Alien (to go with Saturn and also the one that took me a while to guess)

Number 10: Threadcakes: The Friendly Narwhal (it's the horn sticking out of the ocean)

Shark Attack and Ocean Themed Cupcakes

For my friend Shelly's birthday this year, I was going to make her a cake that had a crew theme to it, but being unable to find the right supplies at the store and also waiting until the afternoon of ruined my chances of doing that.  Instead, I chose an ocean theme and went with the "Shark Attack" cupcake from my Hello Cupcake book (which will give you more detailed instructions), since Shelly is a beast in the water just like a great white.

I made blue frosting to cover the cupcakes for the water effect.

I also made some grey frosting for the shark.

I gave the cupcakes texture to make the ocean look choppy.

Next I made the shark out of a Twinkie and put him on top of a cupcake.

I made some life preserves out of powdered doughnuts and fruit roll ups.

On some of the other cupcakes, I added some Swedish fish.  The rest I left blank except for the three I used to write out Happy Birthday Shelly.

Here's a close up of the writing.

Kyle's Christmas Train Cake

For my brother's birthday, I made him a train cake.  He likes trains and was really into them when he was younger and even had a train themed bed room.  He is much older now, but I thought a train would still be a good idea for a cake.

Choo Choo!

I decided to make a chocolate cake with peppermint icing filling.  I started by smashing up some candy canes.

I mixed the candy canes into the frosting.  Just a note, make sure the cake is going to get eaten right away if you want to put candy canes in it and still have the crunch.  they get gooey after a while.

Next I made the cake and cut it into sections for the train.

I layered the cake to make the front of the train and had some extra left over, so I decided to make a coal car to go with it.  I used the peppermint frosting to fill the cake

Next I started frosting the cake with non peppermint frosting.  I also decided to add a cow catcher to the train, which was a nice decorative thought, but really crumbly and a pain to frost.

After I finished frosting it, I added some decorations including a candle for a smoke stack, chocolate wheels and some "santa's coal bubble gum" for the coal in the coal car.

I added some candy canes to give it some extra design and used the crook part of the cane as a way to show how the cars could be connected together.  The cake turned out like this once the smoke stack was lit.  Also, that bottle is root beer.

Here's a look at the inside and you can see how coal like the bubble gum was.

Thanksgiving Turkey Cake!

For Thanksgiving this year, I went with my friend and co-cake maker John to his family's Thanksgiving celebration.  We decided to make a turkey cake to surprise his family with.

We started by making the cake and cutting it into the appropriate rounded turkey shape.

This is the final frosted body (not a brown baseball hat).  The front of the turkey is the left and the back is leveled so that we would have something to stick the feathers into.  We used chocolate cake and chocolate frosting, which helped hide any little errors or crumbs getting into the frosting.  The frosting smelled delicious and I got to smell it all the way to John's family's house as it was sitting on my lap for the car ride.

After the body was done, we made the feathers.  We tried to use a cookie cutter as a stencil to pour the hot sugar into, but it didn't work too well and as a result we got this interesting layer of sugar to come off with the cookie cutter.

Instead of the cookie cutter, we poured the sugar onto a silpat and added food coloring and texturing with a tooth pick.  We then used the toothpick as a way that we could insert the feathers into the cake.

For the turkey's head, we made some rice krispies and molded it into the shape of a turkey's head.  We then covered it with chocolate and gave it a walnut for an eyeball.  We put it into the freezer to let the chocolate set up.

We assembled the cake on the back of John's car once we got to his family's house.

The feathers went into the cake alright and looked better than we hoped for.  The only problem was the ones we put too close to the back pulled at the cake and threatened to fall down.

We just moved those feathers closer to where the head was going to be and that seemed to solve the problem.

Next we added the head to the turkey to finish it off.  We were happy that the head didn't fall over, but after a little while the head slowly drooped backwards.  Luckily by then, John's family had seen the cake and how it was supposed to look.  There was much delicious feasting with it in the end.