baking
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!
What is an Iggle Piggle?
I’m not entirely sure, but this is a picture of him:
Iggle Piggle
I made a fondant version of him for the cake place:
Iggle Piggle in Fondant
I think it looks decent, but it was hard to capture his odd bean shaped head properly.
Fondant Iggle Piggle
It was fun 
I didn’t cover the cake in Fondant, I’m going to have to learn how to do that properly!
Halloween 2008!
I haven’t written in a while and that is because of the amount of prepparation Hallowen required. It was well worth it!
My work takes Halloween so seriously… more so than any other place I know of. We had a costume contest, a pumpkin carve-off, a bake sale and a candy cart! It was hard to focus.
Here’s a pic of my costume in it’s full glory:
This is how you dance in space
And a picture of the graveyard cake I baked for the bakesale:
Most delicious graveyard I've ever eaten
aaaaand the Pumpkin we carved for the Pumpkin Carve-off at work:
No mercy for gourds in Pumpkin Hell
My pumpkin-carving team was my co-worker Jess, our boss Libby and Pau, the Tech manager dude. It was great! We had 40 minutes to do this. Libby brought her dremmel tool and the little gourds. We carved up the little ones and each little gourd had a tea light in it. Unfortunately, we didn’t win, but I know ours was technically the best as far as carving went.
I handed out Candy at Jess’ house and the highlight was seeing a kid dressed up as “Indiana Bones”. We went to the supermarket in Kensington and had a good time too, despite some douchery.
Something about halloween + drinking + skanks = douchery. It’s inevietable but we didn’t let it get us donw!
I had so much fun! Now that it’s all over, I’ve taken down the halloween edition of anitabot – but don’t worry there will be another.
See the rest of my Halloween pictures here!
New website, cupcakes and early Saturday morning.
I (finally) converted my entire site over to wordpress! Bye-bye PHP. I also got rid of my “work” page, since that was mostly put up when I was looking for a job. I started from the ground up, with a fresh WordPress install, finding a nice simple theme that I could adapt to my needs and then eventually moving the blog itself to the root directory. No more “/blog” business. Now that it’s front and center, I really need to update it
a cupcake I made once
Why am I awake at 8:00 on Saturday morning? Good question. I’d normally never see this side of a weekend, but I’ve taken on a part time job at the Cupcake shop my friend works at! I’m doing my first shift today – just a few hours training getting familiarized with processes and what not. I’m a bit nervous but mostly excited to use a different part of my brain, to be working in a real bakery, and to be working with my friend!
(I took cake decorating class with this friend, our passion for baking goes deep and so this should be extra fun).
This reminds me, I have to re-do the Anitabot icon with a chef’s hat. It’s actually somewhat appropriate now 
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