Threadcakes

Threadless, my favorite t-shirt place, had a contest to make cakes based off a design for one of their shirts.  As a result, my friend and I assembled a cake based on their shirt "The friendly narwhal."  Here's the link: http://www.threadcakes.com/entries/view/945

The winners are in, and well, I didn't win, but I was beat by some truly amazing cakes.  To see for yourself, go here: http://www.threadcakes.com/winners

But for those of you who want to see all the pictures of my cake, I decided to post them here now that the contest is over.

Here is John molding our sugar into the narwhal's horn.  Also, working with sugar can be difficult, because it will cool quickly, which is why we had to work it over a stove to keep it pliable.  Also notice the gloves.  Sugar is really hot and it will give you really bad burns if you aren't wearing gloves.  As it was, John and I had some trouble holding on to the sugar.

Carving the cake.

The cake is all carved and we added a gum paste tail.

Then we covered everything in fondant.

Next we painted the whale, no nar at this point, and made some sugar waves.

We made the creatures out of fondant and painted them with food dye.

Then we made the little hearts so we had a friendly whale.

Here's a better picture with the table all cleaned up.

Next, we added the horn to transform our whale into the lovely narwhal.

Unfortunately, the horn immediately fell down.  Our narwhal, with its sagging horn, next to our model, the avenging narwhal playset.

As part of the contest, we had to show the cake being eaten, so anyone up for sushi?

Here's the original design for the cake and even though I didn't win, I got to make a cake to honor nature's unicorn, the narwhal.

Travis's Birthday/Return from the Jungles of Indonesia

When Travis finally returned from spending four weeks in the jungle in Indonesia, working on biological conservation and other such stuff, it also happened to be his birthday, so we decided to throw him a joint "you survived" and "happy birthday" party.  To go along with the theme of being in the jungle, I, with the help of Travis's girlfriend, decided to make some cupcakes with insects on them to remind him of the jungle and how he survived by not getting malaria, which was my idea of what was going to happen to him.

We used some tracings from my cupcake book to start out with some insect shapes.

Next, we piped melting chocolate into the shapes that we traced on some wax paper.  We also added our own mosquito design to go with the malaria theme.

After the chocolate was piped on, we added candy pieces to make the insects' bodies.  I would recommend putting more chocolate than just a trace, because even after being in the fridge for a while, the insects were easy to break when removing them from the wax paper.

To continue the malaria theme, we got some jam and injected into the cupcakes that we were going to put the mosquitoes on.  I saw the large needle at the grocery store a while ago and I was planning on making something with cream filling, but this came first, and it worked well.

It was kind of hard to inject jam, because it is so thick, but it worked well.  I injected in two spots close to the middle to disperse the jam.

Here's the final cupcakes from above.  All the mosquitoes had jam filled cupcakes and we made pinkish frosting for Travis's pasty white skin with black licorice hairs on them.  The rest of the insects were put on a green background.  Also, we made some cupcakes into spiders by making chocolate mandibles that look like mustaches with licorice legs sticking out the sides.

We also added some written cupcakes.  These ones say "I'm not dead yet," "welcome home," and "you survived"

Close up part two.  Also "the boy who lived" which Travis seemed to appreciate the most.

Last close up of the cupcakes.  Also including "happy b-day"

And for those of you who were curious, this is what the jam filled cupcakes looked like.  I didn't get to try one, because Travis took all of them home with him, but from the people who did get one, they said that it tasted really good, which makes me want to do some more flavor experiments.