Adventure Time Cupcakes... Go and tell you friends!

My friend Lauren’s birthday is coming up and since I’ll be away on vacation at that point, I decided to create a gift for her early.  She shares my love of Adventure Time With Finn & Jake, and even dressed up as Lumpy Space Princess for Halloween. So it was a no-brainer.

I also hadn’t baked since LAST Christmas – over a year! So I decided it was high time that I started practicing my skills again.

I haven’t worked with fondant that much at all, so I decided to make the shapes for 4 characters. There is: Finn, Jake, Lumpy Space Princess and Peppermint Butler. They were the easier shapes to capture. I wanted to do Gunther, the penguin but dying fondant (or icing) black is near impossible.

As with any baking/decorating projects, there were some key learnings:

• I planned and sketched out every shape, and noted the colour I would need. This was good
• I started earlier than planned, and each day I did a little bit more than planned, and it worked out perfectly in the end
• Chocolate cake is crappy because it rips more easily when being frosted
• The medium cupcake liners are TOO small. The cupcakes too easily rose above the liner, and so the fondant shapes didn’t sit nicely within. This is bad.
• The medium cupcake liners made the cupcakes smaller and thus they kind of fit awkwardly into my new cupcake carrier. Lesson learned: USE LESS BATTER IN EXTRA LARGE CUPCAKE LINERS.
• Black frosting is hard to make. Watering down chocolate fudge frosting sucks. It was hard to pipe with as it was the wrong consistency. I should have used royal icing for the consistency – but how would I get it to be black? I don’t know, I’ll have to learn.
• Also, outside of a paring knife, what can I use to cut out freehand shapes from fondant? A scalpel? How do I get a smoother edge?

Finns in progress

I’ll explain how I did each character.

First, everything was white fondant that I coloured using Wilton’s gel colours.

Finn: I decided to make two circles of blue – dark for his pants, light for his shirt. The dark blue is a standard round cookie cutter, the light blue is a smaller size. I cut out his hat shape using a paring knife. I also free-hand cut his face. I put the light blue on the dark blue (a little water on the back of fondant and it will stick to other fondant), and then I rolled my rolling pin over to make slight smooshed in. I did the same with his face on his hat, so it looked more ‘inset’. I piped on his face with my horrible black-fudge-frosting mixture that was too watery.

Jake: He just needed yellow and white. I free-handed his jowls. Instead of trying to dye fondant black, I decided to pipe on the blacks of his eyes. Meh! His nose is also piped on.

Lumpy Space Princess: The easiest! I used the standard sized round cookie cutter as a guide, but just free-handed her blobbynes. The yellow star is from a jar of cake decorating sprinkles – I just picked out the yellow ones. I also drew on her face.

Oh my glob!

Peppermint Butler: White circle for his base, and the same dark blue from Finn with a notch cut out for his pants. The red was free handed inside of a standard cookie cutter face. The buttons and face were free-handed. I actually forgot to put on his little red bow-tie. I thought it would be too hard to cut out such a small shape from fondant, so I then thought I could pipe it on, but there wasn’t much space. (And I didn’t want to make a batch of royal icing just for tiny tiny bow-ties).

Peppermint Butler

I used generic frosting to attach the fondant to the cupcakes…

All in all, it was fairly simple, just a lot of work. I have a lot of fondant leftover so I’m going to be making more things. Practice makes perfect!