cartoons
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!
Anitabot Bathroom Graffiti
A few years ago, after I designed the Anitabot logo, I got stickers printed up and handed them out to friends and stuck them around the city. I went to Nuit Blanche ’08 and posted a sticker at every installation I was at, and friends told me later they saw that I had been there. How Novel! (See the album below)
2 Christmas’s ago Aaron designed for me, the greatest Christmas gift ever. A Pop-art rendering of my beloved face! (Yes, I am obsessed with my cartoon alter ego).
Take that, Warhol!
I had ran out of stickers so I tried drawing one on a bathroom stall… I’m not good at free handing, I like vector handles I can pick up and move. Anyway, the ‘bot’ on the left was my doing back in February. I returned to this stall just last week and noticed someone had added on!! I don’t know who this person is, but this is great because I love sugar skulls! I also like that this was a complement to my drawing, and not a defacing. To C, whoever you are, thanks!
Bot left, Sugar Skull right!
This made me think that perhaps I should get more stickers printed and continue my rampage on the city but then decided something that may be a bit more economical: a rubber stamp!
I ordered a kit from www.paper-source.com and I cannot wait until it arrives. I’m excited to try out a new craft. I’m pretty decent at sculpting/carving things, but this will require a very steady hand. I’ll update you when it does, or you may just see the stamp in a bathroom stall near you!
Wall E and EVE 50′s Style Posters at the Disney Store!
Me Wanty!
I saw these wonderfully styled posters at the Disney store today:
Clicking on their names will take you to the Disney Store’s website. I think these can be added to the b-day wish list 
It’d be greater if I had a study/office/den to put them in. :/
Cartoon Post-Mortem?
It’s not that I want our beloved cartoon characters to die… but I think this museum exhibit is really neat. I suppose it caters to both my cartoon-loving and science/museum/skeleton-loving sides! This was sent to me by my friend Jeff!
This exhibit can be found at the natural history museum in Basel, Switzerland. CLICK HERE to see the article and more images.
Cartoon Skeletoon
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