Food | | Page 6

April 23, 2015
by Jennifer Lori 8 Comments

Jake & the Neverland Pirates cake

Yesterday I mentioned a few cakes that I haven’t actually ever posted. This Jake & The Neverland Pirates cake is one of them.

Way back in 2013 Jake & the gang were favorites around here, both the toys and the show. “Aw, coconuts!” was a common complaint, and the Sharkey & Bones cd was on constant loop in my car. I can still sing them in my sleep.

Anyhoo… in 2013 Henri turned 4, so of course he wanted a Jake cake.

Now back then I wasn’t really thinking of the cakes in relation to the blog, because I wasn’t thinking of the blog much. And I didn’t think anyone on my Facebook page would care about step-by-step pics… so I didn’t take any. But I can tell you what I did.

The figures were the first ones I ever hand-painted. I’d been traumatized by my horrible sculpting of the Dora and Diego figures in Henri’s cake the previous year (I can sculpt, not that that cake would show it), and there was no way I was going to start modelling all the Jake gang’s tiny details. So I decided to try painting.

I cut printed images to the scale I wanted and cut them out on ivory fondant (the visible skin tone) the same way you can see here. For painting I used a toothpick and Wilton food gels loosened with a bit of water, and a drop of White White to get the opacity. These figures are small… as you can tell by the toothpicks inside them. If you try it, don’t get stressed if they don’t look ‘right’. Finishing details, like the whites of the eyes and jewelry/touches really make a difference, and they can only often be added once the base layer is dry. Also, no matter how I think they look at 3am when I’ve finally finished… I’m ALWAYS pleasantly surprised the next morning when I look at them again.

The cake was another case of “I don’t know what I want to do so I’ll bake the cakes and figure it out later”. I started by baking 3 cakes, a vanilla round and chocolate 9×11 and 8×8.

I used this toy ^ as a model for Bucky. Easy enough, since we own it and I could have it on the table next to me.

The sand and sea is the vanilla round, torted with buttercream, the ship was made from the chocolate cakes and store-bought chocolate icing.

The accents are all rolled fondant, bought white and tinted to the colors I needed.

I did the “sand” first. After crumbcoating the round I put some fresh vanilla icing over half the cake and quickly covered it with crushed graham crackers. For the sea I covered the other half with a thick layer of blue icing, stopping just shy of the white border. I waited for the icing to crust a bit then chopped up where the white and blue met, for sea froth. (Similar to the top of the Betty Boop cake’s hot tub).The sails are paper flags I made in Excel (for the stripes) and topped with a graphic of a gold doubloon. The crow’s nest is a cupcake/muffin liner. The mast is a straw covered with brown fondant, with some wooden skewers down the center and through the cakes. There’s a disk of fondant under the crow’s nest and a smaller one inside it, to hold it in place.

The cannon is made from gray fondant and also stuck on a toothpick/pressed into the cake for support. There are also toothpicks in the outer 2 legs of each of the 4 railings, and I allowed them to dry for a day before standing them in the cake, so they wouldn’t risk sagging. Finally there was the …what’s that called? Captain’s area? (lol). If you notice in the above pics, that’s the one piece that’s not in place elsewhere. That’s because that solid plaque of fondant was so darn heavy that when I set it in place it made the whole back of the ship start to slide back. I only ended up adding it at the party, RIGHT before serving… and even with that delay I still had to have my hand hovering behind it as I brought it out, so it wouldn’t fall.

I also waited until serving to insert the figures, but that was mostly because I was worried they’d break.

And of course, the birthday boy and his brother at the party, right before the best part- digging in!

(And you can see my hand supporting the large fondant piece).

By the way- this technique for the figures is really practical if you need to make items in advance. This party was 2 years ago (!) and I had the figures in a tupperware in the back of my fridge until a few months ago, and they looked just as good as they did that day. (I probably wouldn’t EAT them, though…)

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Throwing your own pirate party? Try these easy pirate craft ideas as party activities or loot bag stuffers!

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Henri’s other birthday treats

April 22, 2015
by Jennifer Lori 10 Comments

How to Make Minecraft Cake/Cupcake Toppers

So last post I showed you the Minecraft lootbags (inventory chests). Today I’ll show you how I made the toppers for the Minecraft birthday cake.

I wasn’t sure what I was going to do for the cake itself, but I knew I wanted to have a bunch of Minecraft mobs scattered about. I didn’t feel like having to prepare enough fondant in the assorted colors, nor did I really want to start sculpting, so I turned to my current favorite technique- hand-painted toppers.

I’ve used this on a number of cakes, which I’ll link to once I post them. With one exception, Nick’s Star Wars cookies, I always painted with thinned-down color gels, and had great results… (especially the Jake & the Neverland Pirates figures) but there were some flaws. The painted pieces too much longer to dry, making it more difficult to do finishing touches, the “paint” was often very wet, which could cause the fondant base to soften and/or get slimy, and sometimes the piece would crack as it dried (like in the Charlie & Lola cake).

For some reason I switched techniques when making Sean’s last Goalie cake, I tossed in some icing sugar to give my white coloring some opaqueness, and then I recalled painting with icing on the Star Wars cookies. It was a duh moment, and I’ve stuck with that ever since. It’s easier (for me), faster (for me), and it dries quicker, so I can add eyes or other details MUCH faster. Plus, because icing is thicker than water, I can play with layers and build up dimensions, if I want, similar to decorating cookies with royal icing.

My first step is to cut out the topper shapes from fondant (or if you’re painting on cookies, bake them and let them cool until there is no heat left inside, I’d wait overnight if possible). You can use cookie cutters or freehand it, I am not above tracing. I’d printed out the mobs (it stands for mobiles for those of you who don’t play… all the moving characters in the game) I wanted to use and scaled them all to the rough sizes I wanted.

I rolled out some scrap teal fondant left over from Jakob’s 2nd Adventure Time cake, the B-MO & Gunter cakes. The thickness of the fondant depends on the intended use of the piece. In my case I needed something thick enough to stand up, and also be thicker than a toothpick. For something that will be laying flat on a cake you can go thinner, and if it was meant to be a plaque that would stand upright or lean at a diagonal I’d go thicker, so there would be a solid base.

Lay the paper templates out on the fondant and cut it up into manageable sizes, then use a knife or your preferred cutter to trace around the templates. In the pic above you can see I’ve almost finished cutting out Diamond Steve. Keep your fondant scraps and store them properly for next time.

Here are all the mobs cut out. I slid a toothpick into most of them while the fondant was still soft, and reinforced where necessary with more fondant. I wasn’t worried about the smaller fondant blobs showing because I knew I’d be painting with icing, which is thick, but if you’re painting with straight color gels you’d rather have a flat surface.

The next step is to let the pieces dry. I mean really dry. At least a day. Two is better. The longer you can wait, the more in-advance you can get them cut and set them aside, the better, because fondant will wilt and melt when it gets wet, and there is a lot of moisture in the icing. Also, larger pieces will take longer to dry through than smaller ones. The Jake & the Neverland Pirates gang were dry enough to paint after 2 days left exposed to the air. I hadn’t given myself enough time with the Charlie & Lola toppers, they were so big and still flexible after 2 days. Or maybe my house was more humid at the time. Either way, they ended up spending 24 hours in a bed of icing sugar to draw out as much moisture as I could get.

Once the pieces are firm, not floppy, they’re ready to paint.

I didn’t take any in-progress painting shots. You can use whatever you like as a palette as long as it’s food-safe and not used for any non-food purpose. (I also keep my cake stuff away from peanut and nut products because I make 3 nut-free cakes every year). I mostly paint with toothpicks but I have some food-only paint brushes I’ll use from time to time, and I use repurposed apple sauce cups for extra water and icing sugar. There are a bunch of tricks I use, like using a medicine dropper to add water to thin the icing if necessary vs a spoon, so I have more control over how much I add, and using those sewing pins (in the tracing pic) to help mark out any details on the fondant cut-outs, in addition to “drawing” on them before I paint.

These are the non-hostiles- a sheep, Diamond Steve, regular Steve and a pig. I chose some of my kids’ favorite characters, leaving out only the Mooshroom because I knew I already had plenty to cover the cake. Plus if I’d kept going they also wanted an ocelot, and a dog, and a bat, and a spider jockey, and zombies, and…

I didn’t plan too far ahead on each piece, though I do try to work in a way that makes sense. Whenever possible I work backwards in color, to minimize icing waste. For example, I didn’t want to have to re-mix black, so planned to work with it last, and do any details if necessary then, at the end. I started with the Steves, and mixed up their skin color (though now they look like Zombie Steves), then added a touch more brown and used the same icing for the sheep’s face and the lighter areas on his hooves. A touch more brown and it was used for the darker areas of the hooves and Steve’s hair.

The same blue used for Steve was also used for the squid’s face, then darkened for his body, and eventually darkened further for the black.

Just like when painting with real paints, when I mix colors I don’t always blend it all in, so if I’m adding more pink to do some shading on the pig, I only mix it into half of the icing, so I still have some light pink to play with.

The hostile mobs- the Ender Dragon, a spider, a creeper, an Enderman and a squid (who probably isn’t technically ‘hostile’). I don’t know why the Enderman’s eyes don’t look purple, I think the light washed it out ‘cus in person they did. The splotches on the spider were made by mixing in some white while the black was still wet, and most of the details on the Ender Dragon were dry-brushed for shading, since I didn’t have to actually paint him black to start.

The final touch was to make a wooden sign and then the gang was all done, ready to set aside somewhere safe to dry (and avoid being eaten) until the party.

For more from the party:

Minecraft Loot Bags

Minecraft Birthday Cake

Throwing a Minecraft Party

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More Minecraft fun:

How to make Minecraft Steve and Creeper heads

April 21, 2015
by Jennifer Lori 5 Comments

How to Make Minecraft Lootbags

With Jakob’s 8th birthday coming up, and likely another Minecraft-themed event, I realized I never posted any of the pics I took from Henri’s 6th birthday, also Minecraft-themed, back in January. I hadn’t returned to blogging then, so they obviously weren’t here, but I also never posted them on my Facebook, Instagram or Twitter accounts, which all link to each other.

I figured it would be fitting for an inaugural post to break in the ‘new’ blog, as well as officially link everything all together.

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So. When Henri had told me he wanted a Minecraft party I a) wasn’t surprised, because my house is ALL about Minecraft (I play too, my mansion has a giant working waterslide, thankyouverymuch), and b) wanted to go a little beyond just making a cake. I generally try to tie in the invitations and the lootbags, for example, a pirate-themed party had eye patches and gold hoop earrings and spyglasses. So I went looking around online.

I wasn’t completely sure what I wanted to do for the cake yet, and Henri kept wavering on if he wanted a giant Creeper, or an Ender Dragon, or a giant Creeper covered in smaller Creepers… so I put the cake off until it got closer to actually having to bake it. I decided to start with the loot bags and get them ready and set aside.

There are a LOT of great ideas online. I took a look at them, and went to a few stores to see what was available to me. I ended up getting stuff at my local Dollarama, a grocery store, and Papillon (a Bulk Barn-type store), because 2 of those 3 are in the same mall and I had limited time/desire to run around. I found graphics of the Minecraft inventory items online and knocked them together in Word, putting a frame around them only so I would cut them all out the same size. I have included the graphics at the end of this post, feel free to download them and use them for your own projects!

Putting everything together, here’s what I came up with:

The lava buckets had me running around to a few stores. My local Dollarama had a mixed-pack of mini Jell-O knock-offs, but only half the pack was orange or red. I was really hoping to find red/orange (for lava buckets) and blue raspberry (for water buckets… which I had printed and managed to salvage at a later point). In the end I found Jell-O cups at my grocery store, and used those.

The small plastic zip-top bags that the rest of the treats are in are craft bags from the dollar store too, and even the tape used to affix the images was from there. Gotta love when you can find supplies as inexpensively as possible! 😀

The melon slices are sour gummies from the bulk store.

The fish gummies are also from the bulk store. For all the inexpensive candies I just grabbed a few handfuls and portioned them out evenly once I got home.

The ‘gold bars’ are Hershey’s Gold Nuggets. They’re a little more expensive so I counted those out. (Plus, um, 2 for quality control… in my mouth).

The sticks are pretzel sticks. Surprisingly my dollar store didn’t have any, so I bought them at the bulk place and eyeballed ‘even’ amounts.

I’d been planning to get the cookies at the bulk store, they have the Voortman’s ones that you can buy individually, but I found a pack of chocolate chip cookies at the dollar store so that turned out to be cheaper, and each kid got 2 (only because there weren’t enough for each to get 3 in the pack).Initially I wasn’t certain how to package everything together. Then I remembered these boxes we’d had laying around at work. They’re supposed to open the other way- the short ends. So I ripped the glued sides open and re-taped them up with packing tape (ALSO from the dollar store) so they opened like a chest would. If I’d planned that in advance I’d have made the chest graphic large enough to cover the whole side, and printed the word “chest” for the top. But, in a pinch, this worked.

Everything fit nicely inside and I heard the kids loved their “inventory packs”. If you try this yourself and can’t get ahold of boxes, brown paper lunch bags would be fine, or if you wanted to go EXTRA fancy you could get each child their own actual chest from the dollar store.

You can download and print the above images to make your own. I copy/pasted a bunch onto an Excel spreadsheet so I could fit as many to a page as I needed. The bag graphics were sized at 2″ tall by 1.75″ wide, and the chests were 2.25″ by 3.25″.

New York cake

I’ve showed this finished cake before but never actually posted detail shots. Let’s remedy that.

A few years ago a co-worker of my brother’s asked if I could make a cake matching an image she’d found online.

At the time it didn’t occur to me to check online to see whose design it was. I just looked now and can’t find an exact source. I can see it listed on Cake Picture Gallery without a source, and a very similar design here on cakesdecor.com credited to Berliosca Cake Boutique in BC. I don’t know whose came first. In any case, I was asked to make just one tier, no water/bridge/statue, and told she’d provide the apple herself.

I decided to build it up with a checkerboard cake, partly because I needed the height from the three layers to fit the skyline, and partly because I loved the idea of a New York-themed cake having a taxi cab-esque checkerboard on the inside. (It’s deliciouser on the inside. Heh.)

I leveled the cakes and filled them with homemade buttercream, then did a crumb coat around the entire cake. I let that set up in the fridge while tinting some store-bought white fondant into the pale gray-ish blue color. Rolled it out and covered the cake.

I bought pre-tinted black fondant and rolled out a thick disc to set the cake on, then rolled out some strips the height of my tallest building. I eyeballed the building placement, going off the sample pic and just tried to make sure I had some variation in heights for interest. You can see in the pic below that I used a toothpick to support the tallest building. I cut out the buildings in groupings of 2-3 and ‘glued’ them around the cake with a bit of water. I stuck them on after setting the cake in place, so I could make sure to butt them down as low as possible to the ‘road’.

I thinned some black food gel and dotted the ‘stars’ around the sky, and used Wilton whitener for the road markings and the ‘windows’. Sadly I didn’t think to thicken the whitener with a bit of icing sugar, so it paled considerably once dried, and I had to do a second coat on most of them. To make the adorable taxis I tinted some white fondant yellow and shaped it into a rectangular brick. I cut off the outside corners with a sharp knife then sliced the resulting “T” shape into car-appropriate widths. The wheels are tiny flattened disks of black fondant, everything ‘glued’ together with a bit of water.

The last thing to do was the grass for the top. I knew they’d be adding the apple on-site, but making a green fondant disk felt too easy. I had leftover buttercream so I tinted it green and hand-piped the blades of grass with a piping bag and multi-holed icing tip. I later received this pic from the woman who’d bought the cake. I love seeing the inside, seeing that the checkerboard lined up properly! 😀

September 30, 2012
by Jennifer Lori 6 Comments

rainy day cookies

Yannick was away this weekend, and today was too rainy and lazy for me to want to take the boys anywhere after their morning swimming lessons.

Who wants cookies??

I made a double batch of basic vanilla cookies, and divided it in 4 to flavor it up. The boys helped me cut out the shapes…

…and after they had cooled, and the boys played, I iced them. There’s chocolate/mint cookies with mint icing, almond cookies with royal icing, chocolate/coconut that were tapped onto a plate of coconut while the icing was still wet, and peanut butter (un-iced).

Once the boys came down from their sugar rush and went to bed, I knit for a bit. It takes so long per row that I feel like I’m not getting anywhere, but I’ve now done 14 rows since restarting to work on it, and I remind myself that once I finish this blue section I’ve only got 1 red section to do. (I’m trying to ignore the fact that those rows will be 616-728 stitches each).

September 14, 2012
by Jennifer Lori 4 Comments

squee!

So excited! I’m going to my first ever ComicCon tomorrow, and I can’t wait! I’m not dressing up though I admit to trying on my neighbor’s Sailor Moon costume, just to see… LOL but I don’t have the guts. So my extent of geeky getup is my Nintendo remote necklace, my all-time favorite piece of jewelry I own. I bought it and matching earrings from an etsy vendor. I don’t remember her etsy username but her website is http://www.sweetappletea.com. I saw she did a set with the Super NES remote and I requested the original remote as a custom job, and she did such a phenomenal job! I wear it all the time and everyone comments on it.

Yes, I did my nails to match. 🙂

The checkerboard cake was picked up this afternoon, and I think it was a big hit. The woman sent me an example photo she’d found online, and requested only one tier, no water/bridge/statue, icing grass, and said she’d provide the apple.

That’s the example on the upper left, and the rest are the cake I made. I think she was really happy with it!

It was the first time I’d done a real commissioned cake. I’ve done my boys’ cakes for a few years now, and as each family member hits a special bday I (and sometimes with my sister) will make their cake. I made a cake for my mom’s best friend a few weeks ago, and while I guess technically it was commissioned, all I’d been asked was for “a scrabble cake”, so I had free reign on the design. This was the first time I’ve had to match an image and the thought of it being held up to scrutiny was so intimidating that I had knots in my stomach before starting the fondant work. I knew I could make it look like the photo, but I was afraid she wanted exactness and didn’t know if mine would be good enough. I MYCH prefer simply having to work with a theme, than having a sample to be compared to!!

I’m going to get an early night’s sleep now. I’m bringing Jakob tomorrow and he’s decided to dress as Super Tiger for the occasion. (That’s a tiger costume, topped with the superhero cape Maaike made for him. I don’t get it either.)

September 14, 2012
by Jennifer Lori 1 Comment

almost cake

I have a few finishing touches to do before the cake is picked up today.

I love checkerboard cakes, I wish I could be there when they cut into this one!

September 12, 2012
by Jennifer Lori 1 Comment

here we are again

Every time I put off posting I end up with a long list of things to remember to blog about, and then it gets so daunting that I give up and don’t do it.
I think I did better when I did more frequent mini-posts, vs long daily posts trying to recap everything. So we’ll try that again.

I’m baking a checkerboard cake tonight, for my first “commissioned” cake job. More later. 🙂

January 15, 2012
by Jennifer Lori 7 Comments

betty boop cake

Remember back in October I showed a pic of my mom’s birthday cake? And said how I would post more on it later? It’s later!

bettyboopcake

(Today was actually a pretty fun and busy day. I stayed home while Yannick took the kids to swimming, and started cooking the food/making dip/etc for Henri’s 3rd bday party tonight. Once again I only used my camera, not cell phone camera, and don’t have it handy or the pics uploaded. At least this post is about another birthday, and another sweet treat.)

This is the cake my sister Laura and I made for Mom’s 60th birthday.

I made the cake part, then Laura helped to decorate. First I baked 2 (9″?) round cakes, both vanilla but one tinted red. I wanted them a bit more dense than a regular box mix, so while I did use Betty Crocker mixes, I doctored them with less oil and added instant pudding mix. That was on the Thursday before the party (Sunday). On Friday I made a batch of buttercream, leveled the cakes, torted them (sliced them in half widthwise) and iced in between, stacking them, from the bottom up, red, icing, white, icing, red, icing, white. I wanted a white layer as the top so none of the red would show or seep through the top layer of icing, just in case. I then gave a quick crumb-coat over the whole cake.

I had more time that afternoon, so I started decorating. First I took some of my leftover icing and tinted it a pale blue, then set it aside. I rolled out white fondant until I had it almost long enough to go around the cake. It took me 2 strips to go around the width, but I made the seams look like seams in the wood, so you can’t tell.

I dabbed the back of the fondant lightly with a q-tip in water, and pressed onto the sides of the cake, smoothing well to remove any air bubbles. I put the cake in the fridge for a bit to set up.

Once the icing had crusted over I went back over it with the blue icing, mixing the two with my knife as I went, and chopping it up a bit so it looked frothy and bubbly. Then I sat down to do the wood grain.

First I went around the cake, using a sharp knife to score the fondant lightly to look like the individual wood slats. I went around the top edge and made little cuts as if the wood was weathered and beat up. I went around the cake again with a black edible ink marker, randomly making little lines and drawing knots in the wood. Then I used a food-only paintbrush, some water, and some brown icing gel and covered the sides and top completely. First I’d use almost a 100% concentration of gel to go over the score marks, then I’d blend it out with the water, and some gel-tinted water. I made sure to have it darker in some areas, lighter in others, and tried to make it look old and used. The way the water reacts with the fondant leaves it glossy, so it looked like it has been shellacked.

Two black fondant “bars” with silver “nails” finished up the hot tub, and then I used some green icing in a squeeze bottle-thing to individually pipe each and every blade of grass to decorate my dollar-store platter.

Laura came over late that night once she got home from work, and she made Betty Boop’s head while I made the legs, arms and accessories.

The bikini and flip-flops were planned, but the boobs were a last-minute addition ‘cus she didn’t look properly “settled” in the tub without them. 🙂

And that was Mom’s cake. We had made it secretly and Yannick delivered it to the brunch her friends were throwing, and she had no idea it would be there. I heard it was a big surprise, and a big hit. They were almost against cutting into it, but they did, and they ate it, and even saved me a nice, tall slice.

January 14, 2012
by Jennifer Lori 2 Comments

covered in icing

My day ended covered in icing. Always, when I make the birthday cakes, since the parties are usually on Sundays, I bake on Thurs, dirty-ice on Fri and decorate on Sat. So today was decoration day. I knew better than to risk starting to make my buttercream while the boys were up, but I wasn’t worried about getting a late start because of how much I got done being home yesterday.

In the afternoon my neighbor brought her 7-month-old daughter over for us to babysit, and my boys had a BLAST playing with her. She was seated in her Bumbo like a princess on a throne, and the boys didn’t stop parading in front of her trying to make her laugh. First Jakob would do somersaults across the room, then Henri broke in with a guitar solo, and Jakob wouldn’t be outdone, so he grabbed some maracas and got in on the performance. It was a riot.

Luckily she practically put herself to sleep just before the boys went down, and I was able to get to work on the cake. But I forgot to take pics with my cell, and my camera isn’t with me at the moment, so instead of cake pics, here’s an update on the holiday gifts for the boys’ daycare teachers.

This is what each teacher (5 in total) got. A red platter, topped with a back scrubber, a crocheted chain-8 dishcloth, a crocheted soap-saver bag with a scented bar of soap inside, and a crocheted bath puff, all wrapped up in cellophane and tied with a ribbon of red yarn.

The chain-8 and bath puff are the standard patterns I’ve been using for years, and are linked from the projects on my Rav pages. The soap saver I just made up on the spot, and is basically just a sc1-ch1 pattern around, with a drawstring near the top. All was done with 2 shades of holiday Bernat Handicrafter cotton, plain white Handicrafter, and a 4mm crochet hook.

I’ve made these as teacher gifts before, but both my boys are with new teachers now so none of these 5 have received this gift before, so I didn’t mind recycling the idea. The daycare owner, however, has already received this gift, so I needed to come up with something new. She also happens to be pregnant, and due with a little boy any day now. So she got this:

It’s 2 shades of Bernat Baby Coordinates from my stash, worked in a simple granny square, using a 4mm crochet hook. I would have liked to have gone bigger, but it was late, she was leaving on mat leave the next day, and my hand was starting to cramp into a claw.

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