First party was a baby shower for my sister-in-law. This was a joint project between my SIL's SIL and moi (with a lot of prep on the day of the shower from my cousin Teresa. Thanks Teresa!) My house has been such a disaster lately, I needed to do a LOT of tidying and cleaning for this one, especially since normal people were coming, not just my family (mwahaha). We decided to have a Winnie the Pooh theme, since my SIL is such a Pooh fan. This was a fun theme to play up, it gave me the opportunity to play around with a few things. First, cake pops. I had been dying for an excuse to make cake pops. Do you know about cake pops? Bakerella has a lot of ideas. She even has a book. Darn internet, though, meant I couldn't just make a regular cake pop. No, I found Winnie the Pooh head cake pops and Hunny Pot cake pops. Awesome! I was smart enough to do a test run and realized very quickly that the Pooh heads were beyond my patience level. But the Hunny pots were easy enough. The tricky part was writing "Hunny" - the Wilton food markers I had were not up to the task and I ended up using black gel icing and it was drippy. If I were going to focus more on cake pops in my life I'd probably hunt down the markers Bakerella recommends. Anyway, these were super easy, even making a cake from scratch instead of using a boxed mix. I just made the cakes the weekend before and froze them. I think I made the cake pops out of red velvet cake.
The other fun project for the shower was a Winnie the Pooh cake. It all started because Kid 1 is allergic to peanuts, which means bakery products are always a bit iffy, so I volunteered to make the cake. I had intended to make just, you know, a cake. But that darn internet! I found a cool Winnie the Pooh cake. This was such a neat idea, I loved the look of the cake. But it was too blue for a girl cake (I love blue but not for a girl baby shower) and it used fondant. There is something you need to know about me: I don't like fondant. First of all, fondant tastes gross. Second, fondant means you have to put two layers of icing on the cake - one buttercream and one fondant. Too much work! Third, I hate rolling out anything, there was no damn way I was going to roll out icing! (I could add a fourth: cost.) A bit of internet searching led me to the paper towel technique. Absolutely fascinating, the things people come up with. Turns out if you ice a cake with buttercream and stick it in the fridge (or just let it sit on the counter long enough), you can rub the cake with an unpatterned paper towel and smooth the icing out to look a heck of a lot like fondant. Smooth fondant look, no rolling pin. I was sold! It was a bit finicky but I could handle it. The inspiration cake had the Pooh characters sculpted out of fondant, but my aunt managed to find some figurines at the Disney Store when she was on vacation. Score!
Anyway, I think it turned out pretty well:
OK, that is enough for today. Next up will be the kid's birthday party cake, which wasn't nearly this complicated.
* I do realize that I am ending some sentences with a preposition. I know this is poor grammar. I promise not to do this in my dissertation. But perfectly proper grammar always sounds so haughty to me, I just can't write that way and keep a conversational feel. Suck it up.
2 comments:
awesome job! next time you need fondant look up marshmallow fondant - tastes so much better!
I've heard of marshmallow fondant but I'm still not icing a cake twice and rolling out fondant. I'm much too lazy!
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