Tuesday, August 16, 2011

"Monster High" cake

For my daughter's 8th Birthday she told me she did not want cakepops.
Nor cupcakes.
She wanted a cake.
(And of course she wanted a cake that has no Wilton shaped cakepan that would have made it easy on Mom.)
But me, being the excellent Mother I am, told her I would make her the "Monster High" cake she was wishing for!
Monster High is a line of fashion dolls that are monster teens (think Barbie meets Halloween). Not only is it dolls, but they have online games, webisodes & have had a cartoon movie for Halloween.

After scouring the internet for a shaped cakepan (no such luck,) I got some ideas from other cake photos posted. I used my daughter's Monster High t-shirt as a guide.  I knew I wanted to do the skull with a bow- I figured it shouldn't be too hard...
So first I baked my cakes... since the skull was relatively small (for a party of hungry kids) I decided to make a double decker cake with a layer of frosting in the middle, so it would serve more peeps. I just used the confetti (boxed) cake, then spread some (store bought) chocolate frosting in between the 2 stacked cakes.
 Next I traced the skull from my daughter's shirt, cut it out & used it as a guide to carve the cake.
Since piping the icing on with a star-shaped tip seem to be the most forgiving, I decided to cover the cake with them, instead of smoothing on icing. I was really happy with how well it came out!
Next to add a little color & to liven up the tray that I was serving the cake on, I used some cookie cutters to cut out diamonds from fondant. Then I made an argyle type pattern of teal & hot pink diamonds.
And lastly, I made Count Fabulous, the pet bat of one of the Monster High characters (Draculaura). I had both sugar paste & fondant. The fondant seemed to hold it's shape better- so I ended up using that. I think the bow & eyes are sugar paste however. *I can't remember exactly, because it has been a month since I made this!...shoulda blogged sooner!*
Ta Da!
This was my first attempt using fondant & I was so pleased with how easy it was to mold a character! My hands did get really stained from hand-mixing the wilton color into the fondant, but no biggie. I definitely want to use fondant again, but probably not to cover a whole cake because it doesn't taste that great. But the kids did enjoy eating the diamonds. :)

Monday, January 17, 2011

Santa Hat cakepops

For my childrens' school bakesale, I made Santa Hat cakepops! I was really pleased with how they turned out. I followed the directions in Bakerella's Cakepops book... the only thing I changed was the "pompom" on top. I think it called for a white gumball, I substituted it with a mini marshmallow that I cut in half.

I also spruced up the display by covering the styrofoam block with Christmas wrapping paper!
I also used Christmas colored curling ribbons to tie off the treat bags that were placed on each hat.
And lastly, to satisfy the school's requirement I added a small note on allergen information.