Anitabot.com

Adventure Time Cupcakes (For my friend Lauren!)

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!

Tags: adventure time, baking, decorating, finn, fondant, jake, lauren, lumpy space princess, peppermint butler

Christmas Baking

This past Christmas, I just wasn’t feeling it. Perhaps due to my mind being occupied with wedding planning stuff, or just general fatigue from the season. For whatever reason I didn’t have it in me to try to think of gifts, brave the malls and stress out over that so I decided to make people cookie-boxes.

I made:
Gingerbread
Shortbread with Maple Syrup Icing
Vanila Sugar Cookies with Raspberry Jam Filling
Macaroons

Even now it seems like not that much, but since I was lazy and left it all to the last week it was quite a lot! As you can see in my little slide show above my macaroons look kind of… weird. That is because I can’t seemingly try a new recipe without screwing it up somehow. This time I just put in 2x the amount of shredded coconut that was needed so they didn’t form into balls well.

Though, as suspected – too much coconut is never a bad thing and in the end they turned out fine, and lesson learned.  The odd thing about this whole experience is that I got cookied-out. I didn’t eat any of my own cookies. Sure, I ate the raw dough (especially of the Vanilla Sugar Cookies), but I didn’t actually have any of my own. Whereas normally I can’t stop. I think I just got sick of them.  It was a labour of love and everyone seemed to be pleased with their boxes and no one was poisoned so it was a success!

Next year though, I may hit the malls.

Halloween brings out the crafter in us all.

Somehow October flew by me at unprecedented speeds, and because of this I didn’t have a lot of time to hype myself up for it. The pressure of trying to put together a costume and something to bring to the work bakesale probably helped me with my creativity. With no time to languish in creative-thinking hell, I set straight to it.

Firstly, my Halloween costume:

Rabbid & Manny Calavera

That is me as a Rabbid (from Rayman Raving Rabbids fame), and my boyfriend as Manny Calavera from Grim Fandango.  I wore this to work but did not win any costume prizes. However, I got some wonderful responses while out on the street and was in more than a few strangers photos! I’d love to see them, but have no way of finding them. If you were out near kensington in Toronto and took a pic of/with me I’d love to see it!

This is what I used to make the costume:

• Posterboard
• Felt
• Acrylic Paint
• Styrofoam balls
• leggings/leg warmers
• and old shirt
• papier mache (over a balloon)
• a lot of moxie (and tape)

Basically I created a large tube to sit on my shoulders out of the posterboard, cut out an area for the face and taped it up. Then I stuck an inflated balloon into the top and papier mache’d over it so the dome would be joined to the tube. I used sharpies and paint on the eyes, and the same for the mouth/face area.  It’s a bit hard to see but I did even have a plunger! Bwaaah!

The other craft item I made was the Pumpkin Cake:

Pumpkin-o-lantern Cake

It was made using 2 betty crocker cake mixes (French Vanilla for the Pumpkin, Chocolate for the dirt patch), home made cream cheese frosting + a can of store bought chocolate frosting, oreo cookie crumbs and fondant.

Using a sphere cake pan, we carved out the shape of a pumpkin, covered it with fondant and used the end of a knife to score the lines. We added the stem and the vine and put it on the the base, which was covered in oreo cookie crumbs for the ‘dirt’ effect. It was my first time covering a cake and fondant and I think it worked so well because pumpkins are lumpy by nature.

I’ve decided that I need to craft something once a month. Since there are no major holidays in November, I’m not sure where my inspiration will come from but hopefully I’ll find it.

Happy Halloween!

Pac-Man Sugar Cookies!

Earlier this week with the help of my good friend K, I created these Pac-Man sugar cookies:

Picture taken by Shaun Hatton

I got the idea from the great blog Snack or Die.  The same place where I got the idea/instructions for my rabbid cookies.

These took longer than I would have liked but I learned a lot. We had watered down the royal icing to flood the cookies, but we had frozen them afterwards. When they came out of the freezer they started to melt and we had to let them air dry again to get that nice hard coating. So freezing = bad idea.

One of the best things about baking, other than the fun, and eating it afterwards is giving the baked goods away. Everyone loves receiving a treat and it’s nice to see smiles on people’s faces.  I gave a bunch of these guys to Shaun Hatton over at Toronto Thumbs, and he made a little post about it! So, what better time than now to direct you to the wonderful Toronto based game blog he is a part of! Check it out!

Now I’m off to think of my next video game related cookie project. I’ll keep you updated