figurines suck!

As promised here are pictures of Mom's 60th birthday cake. She has fallen in love with the pacific coast (especially hunting for shells and the pelicans)... so without further ado...

So I am not the most skilled when it comes to sculpting figurines... If they are round and basic I'm ok (like the monkey). But the more complex stuff (like the pelican below) frustrate me cause they look nothing like I think they should.

Overall I think the hand painted shells came out well... The trial ones are, of course, on the back where they are less likely to actually be looked at.

I found some cool pillars... they are hollow and you can fill them with whatever you want (though they suggest not to fill them with liquids). These are filled with 2 different colors of sprinkles. I figured it would add to the ocean theme.

upcoming projects

So as promised at Easter there will be fun cookies for BECKY DAY!!!! Assuming the weekend alone doesn't kill me (pregnant + active 18 month old = tired mommy!)

Guess it's time to break out the cookie cutters and maybe enlist my mom for help with her recipe (since it worked sooo well for me last time). Now to think of a theme... hmmmm

Then next week will be the baking and decorating of NeeNee's 60th birthday cake. I have a great seashell mold for making candy for the edging. She has fallen in love with pelicans and the pacific coast so I figured I do an adult ocean theme. I figure a light blue cake with the seashells for edging and a pelican figure for the top. It only has to feed like 8 adults and 3 kids under 5 years old so it will probably be a 6in round and 4 inch round (or maybe an 8in and 4 inch).

Pictures to follow....

Pics as promised...

Cookies are EVIL!!!!

So how is it that I can bake cakes and make ganache but I can't make let alone bake a simple sugar cookie!

So my mom tells me at Christmas that she has an awesome recipe for really easy sugar cookies. I was running behind so she made us some to decorate and they were awesome. She made a TON of cookies. She claimed that she couldn't make cut out cookies (they always blobbed on her and were indistinguishable) but these came out amazing. So for Easter I decided to use my egg, bunny and butterfly shaped cutters to make some fun cookies.

I attempted the recipe that she sent and that was a huge no go! I measured everything and mixed it according to the recipe and it looked like sand. I finally managed to squeeze it into a ball shape to chill in the fridge (as per the recipe). A few hours later I tried to roll them... HA! I got about 6 cookies worth out of 1/5 of the dough. Baked them as the recipe said and they are the crispest ones I've ever seen that weren't actually burnt. So I went with my back up dough roll that I had in the fridge.

Those rolled fairly well but when baked stuck to the cookie pan! I managed to get a few usable ones so that I can make some fun cookies for the kiddos for Easter. So I've got a total of maybe 20 cookies after working on them for about 2 hours.

GRRRR!

Assuming I don't just throw them all across the room tomorrow when trying to make them pretty I will add some photos.

Figures and 1st birthdays...

So 1st Birthday cakes often present a challenge. You generally have to feed a crap load of people but you also want something that the new toddler can smash and smush. As you can see in this photo... the cake is built in tiers and the top most one is actually only slightly larger than a cupcake.


Figures can be great cake toppers. This monkey is fairly simple to make (mostly just circles and rods). The internet can be very useful to find ideas. This one is a conglomeration of several different monkeys that I found online.

Truffles!

Truffles are soo much fun to make! Plus they're a tasty way to use up left over ganache, other than just licking the bowl!


Basically its the same ganache recipe as an earlier post. Then I used powdered chocolate in a small bowl. I used a melon baller to make them approximately the same size. Then rolled them in the powdered chocolate. The melon baller on its own worked really well when the ganache was cold (from being in the fridge) but they started to stick as the metal melon baller and the ganache warmed.

I wonder how they'd look on a cake?

And then there was cake...

So Jess's cake didn't turn out nearly as cool as I'd hope but he was thrilled with it (good husband!)... The squig was impossible to shrink (with my skills). I haven't figure out a good medium for sculpting yet. Fondant is too soft. Modeling chocolate is too sticky. The x-wing presented similar problems. SO... the computer chips multiplied and became the side decorations. After spending hours trying to get the darn x-wing to work I finally gave up at 11:30 last night. I went to McD's for Jess's birthday lunch and got an x-wing in the happy meal!

As promised here are the photos

The desktop with a dos prompt (but the backslashes are backwards... ooops... but my wonderful hubby didn't point it out)


Here's the finished cake...

Close up on the computer chip thing

Next up... monkeys and princesses