Happy Thanksgiving!

Turkey Lurkey wishes you a Happy Thanksgiving. He also wishes he wasn't a cupcake, since cupcakes also get eaten on Thanksgiving Day.

Since dinner for our family is at 5pm, that means I have all morning to sew!! 

Liz Cakes, Part Deux

I have had so much fun playing with cupcake design. When I fist began playing out of the Hello, Cupcake series I made them for family and friends, and occasionally for DH to take to work.  It wasn't long before his coworkers began asking if I could make cupcakes for them personally, or for a child's birthday. So I began experimenting. Here are some of my favorites.



Mickey's Clubhouse: I used jumbo cupcakes to make the base of the clubhouse and Toodles, and marshmallows to make the shoe.




A Scooby-Doo party: The Mystery Machine and Scooby-Doo.....




......and Velma, Fred, more Scooby, Shaggy and Daphne. The characters were made with chocolate melt wafers.




Optimus Prime: I borrowed the design basics from Robo-Cup (What's New, Cupcake) and found a first generation toy online that I sketched out. I used silver metallic sugars, chocolate covered mini doughnuts and mentos. The head was a vanilla wafer dipped in chocolate melt wafers, the face hand drawn very carefully.

I think Optimus is my #1 favorite.



Liz Cakes!

One of the neatest things about the new Blogger Dashboard is being able to easily see which pages people are viewing. It seems that people really enjoy the cute cupcake designs, and I realized I still have many cupcakes that I have not posted!  So here are just a few....



DH's birthday cupcakes, from What's New Cupcake




Fat Cats, from Hello Cupcake




Fake-out Backyard Grill, from What's New Cupcake

 I love making all these cupcakes. They can be pretty time consuing the first time or two that you play with the decorating ideas, but as you get the hang of it, things seems to get easier. Word of advice? Wear a large apron and keep a damp washcloth nearby for wiping your fingers off as you get icing and other yummy treats on them. I truly believe that the icing seeps into your bloodstream via your pores, so you'll get a big enough sugar rush without having to eat the cupcakes (unless, of course, you want to!!)

I can't wait to get my hands on the newest book, Cupcakes, Cookies and Pie, Oh My!  But to be honest, I've also been making some of my own designs. I'll post them tomorrow!

Chocolate Moose

More fun with cupcakes! I've been continuing to play with my fun cupcake books and have had the pleasure of fooling people with.....Chocolate Moose!

Jon had a pot-luck day at work, so he told one of his co-workers to mark him down for chocolate moose. Since it sounds the same as mousse, that's what he wrote down.  And so Jon had the fun of bringing in a dozen chocolate moose cupcakes into work that day. They were, obviously, a big hit. Adorable and delicious. The snout of the moose is a Twinkie. That's the only secret you'll get out of me. The rest you can get out of the book, What's New, Cupcake.

Moose packed in, ready to go on their final journey....

"Duck"-orating and Other Cupcake Stories

Just a quick interlude about the cupcakes! I never was able to get pictures from my friend, but I did take a few on Jon's crap-tastic camera.

For the baby shower: Ducks

My favorites are the duckie butts.  Since I don't have the completed pics, I can't show you the faces.  But they were adorable.  These are from the What's New, Cupcake book by Karen Tack and Alan Richardson. The feet and duck bills are made from Starburst. Duck tails are marshmallows cut along the diagonal. And how do I get them so sleek? Melting the icing! So easy!

For the Superbowl party we went to, I made football cupcakes....

Yes, some of them are not decorated. That's because Jon decided he didn't want to eat the choclate candies used to make the footballs. All they are is the Milky Way mini's with Tootsie Rolls shaped into the football tips.  Again, dipped in the melted icing.  Because some of the candies were Snickers, I had to ice them with more "astro-turf", since I am allergic to peanuts. 

Both times, these cupcakes were a HIT!! Everybody loved them. And I loved making them.  There will be many more cupcakes in the future, I can guarantee you!

Adventures in Decorating

Today, I decorated the cutest cupcakes in the world. Bought the book, "Hello, Cupcake" and it has the best ideas ever.  Now I desperately need the companion book, "What's New, Cupcake"!!! Check out the adorable Snow Family and trees.....

Aren't they just precious???  I love that she uses every day candies and such to decorate her creations.  Starburst, however are NOT as easy as she makes it out to roll out, but once I got the hang of nuking them for 5 seconds to soften 'em up a bit, it wasn't so bad.  I will say that in the future, I will be buying appropriate decorating tips and bags, because the zippie bags she suggests just didn't work out the way I expected them to. It's difficult to cut the accurate shaped tips to create the leaves.  I will NOT do that again. 

But I do like her recipe for making a firmer cake that doesn't fall apart, I LOVE it!  She adds 1 cup of buttermilk in place of whatever amount of water the box calls for.  Then you use the required amount of oil, and use 4 eggs.  The cake has a much firmer, yet still light texture that was a breeze to decorate.  Which would have been marvelous to have when I made Stephanie's baby shower cake, and I had to glue it together with icing all over to make it the correct shape.  It all worked out in the end, the finished cake was beautiful and she loved it, but I had to keep shoving the cake into the freezer to get it to firm up a bit before trying again!

Exhibit A: Messy cake

Exhibit B: Beautiful cake

Messy exhibit will NEVER happen again, now!!  I can't wait to try new ideas with cakes and cupcakes!