Skylander Cupcakes

I asked my son if he wanted a cake or cupcakes for his birthday and he said he wanted cupcakes. You would think that cupcakes are easier to make than an actual cake, but that's not always the case. It's true if you're making a small batch, like one recipe. When you make reveral recipes worth of cupcakes, it increases the time to decorate significantly since you have to decorate each one separately. I took a beating with the stein cupcakes because they were just so labor intensive. I personally like cupcakes, but I don't really care for decorating them.

Since the boys are in to Skylanders and the things that my son wanted the most for his birthday were a few skylander figures, I figured I would tie that in to the cupcakes. Skylander figures are broken up into eight elements. They are earth, fire, wind, undead, tech, water, magic and life. I decided to put the element symbols on the top of the cupcakes. I ended up with 22 cupcakes, so most of the symbols were put on three cupcakes and a couple of them were only on two.

It's an Oktoberfest Carnivale

This was an interesting request. A co-worker called me asking if I could make some cupcakes for a bridal shower. The theme was a combination of Octoberfest and Carnivale since the couple had those backgrounds. The invitation had a stein with a big plume of feathers coming out of the top. They were also giving away gummy bears as part of the party favors.

I stewed on this one for a bit before I came up with the design. The person ordering wanted an example, which I typically don't do, but made an exception in this case. I made a couple of examples. One was a flat option where the stein was cut out of fondant and laid on the cupcake. The other was the more 3D vertical option that I ended up with.





Beleive it or not, the vertical stein was easier than the one laying flat. I had to cut out the one laying down freehand, and it took a while. I liked the result, but I would have had to charge an arm and a leg for those. The vertical ones took some time, but were a lot easier to make. I only had to worry about stability with those, which I figured I could handle.

She wanted half chocolate and half white cupcakes so people could choose which ones they wanted. There were also going to be up to two cupcakes per person, so I think I ended up doing close to fifty. The steins are made from marshmallow fondant, with butter cream icing highlights and foam on top. I then attached a yellow gummy bear to the side of the stein to pull in that detail as well. The feathers in the top are real. I glued the feathers to a sucker stick and pushed that down through the stein and cupcake to stabilize them.

Christmas Tree

My neighbor asked me to make a cake for her mother that they were going to bring over for Christmas. She brought me a picture of one that her mother was absolutely in love with. After examining the picture for quite a while, because it was fairly low resolution, I realized that the tree in the picture was made of fondant or sugar paste. The person who made the original cake in the picture wanted to reuse the tree. I didn't like that idea, so I started modifying the cake design.

I decided to use cookies for my tree. I have a nesting star cookie cutter set. The problem is, one of the cutters is missing. Regardless, I made some sugar cookies and started cutting them into the various sizes I would need. I had to manually cut out the start in the size I was missing. After the cookies cooled, I glazed them with royal icing and stacked them up in a spiral pattern so it would look more like a tree and not a stack of cookies. After that, I piped in "ornaments" for the tree and little icicles. Some of the ornaments are tiny balls of fondant.



The cake was white with butter cream icing. The presents under the tree, including the bows, were made from marshmallow fondant.

This cake worked out great. The kids ate the cake, and the adults sat around eating the cookies with their coffee since it was pretty early. The mother loved the cake so much that she cried when they gave it to her. I'm told that she also has a picture of it hanging prominently on her wall.

A Birthday Roast

My son wanted a Skylanders cake for his birthday. He waffled between a Starcraft theme and Skylanders, but Skylanders finally won out.

If you are not familiar with Skylanders, it is a game where you have this little figures that you put on a base that connects up to a game system. When you put a character on the base, you get to play that character in the game. It's been a huge hit since Christmas. You almost can't find these things in the store at all.

After working on ideas for a while, my son decided he wanted one of the characters called Ghost Roaster. Now, I could either to the character laying down, or use an idea that I had been wanting to try for a while. Originally, my wife and I came up with this idea for a Ben 10 cake. I won't explain who that is if you don't know. The idea is to take a character like this and copy it onto a transparency so that it looks like a projection coming out of the cake. That's exactly what I did here.



I made the base out of cake and covered it with a thin layer of fondant. Now, I only had a couple of hours to do this, so it is certainly not my best work. Normally, it would look more like the stone it is supposed to be made out of. I was pressed for time because we had a really busy week and lots to do to prepare for the party.

Once the base cake was done, I took a glob of the fondant and formed it into the base for the figure. I then took the transparency and bent is slightly before pushing it into the fondant base it had. It stood up perfectly. My son was happy with it, though I was a bit disappointed. I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so wasn't totally thrilled with this one.

Baked Millionaire Pie

For Christmas Eve with the in-laws, I was volunteered to bring the dessert. I made baked millionaire pies and a chocolate covered cheesecake. I figured I would give people an option and anything left over could be eaten at my mom's the next day.

You've seen the picture of the chocolate covered cheesecake from an earlier post, but the millionaire is one of my wife's favorites. It's like a pecan pie, but it has coconut and chocolate chips baked into the mixture as well. I make them as tarts, because the recipe allows me to make two tart-shaped pies. It also means they are a little more firm and there is a little bit less of the goo on the inside.

Holiday gift baskets

I try to give little treats to those that are close to me around the holidays. This year, I happened to be in the dollar store some time in October and saw these cool little metal baskets that were in red or white. I bought a huge stack of them, because I thought they would be perfect for giving out with my goodies for the year. Plus, they were only a dollar, so I wouldn't be forking out all sorts of money for the container to deliver everything in.

I put tissue paper in the baskets, then placed my baked goods in clear bags for display and to keep them fresh. This year, I make Greek cookies that are similar to a biscotti, but not nearly as hard because they are layered. It's one of my favorite cookies to make, but they are rally time consuming. The recipe makes a whole lot of cookies. Plenty to give out and still have some to keep for the family.

I also made some oatmeal cranberry cookies. Another one of my favorites. I gave them out to some of my neighbors and co-workers.

More cheesecake... lots more

My mom and I both like to cook and bake. It's something she passed on to me when I was about 5, and I've been doing it ever since. We both do a lot of baking over the holidays. A group of people at her church were going to have a Christmas dinner with somewhere around 60 people. They asked my mom to cater the event since they had all had her cooking during various parties that she would cook for. My mom decided to do all of the cooking for the dinner and she asked me to do the dessert. We had to figure out what to make. The lady in charge wasn't a lot of help. She wanted something with chocolate, but didn't want cake and didn't want my cake balls either. We decided we would offer the chocolate covered cheesecake.



Cheesecakes take a while to make. Since I have a full time job that doesn't involve any type of cooking, I'm limited to making things in the evenings when I get home from work. In the case of cheesecakes, you have to get the ingredients to room temperature, mix them, make and bake the crust, fill the cheesecake pan, put the pan in a water bath and bake the cheesecake. Then you have to let it cool very slowly in the oven and take it out to let it finish cooling before you can put it in the fridge to set completely. Since I was covering them with chocolate ganache, I couldn't pour on the chocolate until the cheesecake was cool. That usually meant waiting until the next day to coat the one I made the night before.

I started baking on Monday for the Saturday event, because I could only make one a night. I also only have one spring-form pan large enough for the recipe I was using. It makes a 10" cheesecake that's almost 3 inches tall.

The other problem I had was with portions. I didn't want them to randomly cut the cheesecake into pieces, because there was no guarantee that they would cut them equally and that the cheesecakes would go far enough. Plus, people usually make a mess when cutting cheesecakes, because they don't want to take the time to do it right. To ensure that the portions were the same size, there were enough, and they would look good after being cut and served, I had to figure out a way to do prepare them for serving. First, I had to figure out the equal portions bit. To do that, I needed the cheesecakes to be cut into 18 pieces each. If I wanted 12, that would be easy. Make a cut vertical and horizontal across the middle and then start dividing quadrants. For what I was doing, I needed math.



I created a pie chart in MS Excel and printed it out as large as I could. Then I applied that to a piece of card stock to give it some structure. I now had my template for the exact number of pieces. I didn't want to just lay it on the chocolate, because it would mess up the finish, so I inserted needles into the center and at between each wedge of the template. Then, when I pressed the template down on the cheesecake, it simply put little dots where I needed to cut. Next, I had to have a clean cut so these would be presentable. This was actually made easier by the chocolate.



To get the clean cuts, I boiled some water in a large container and placed my longest bread knife in the water. In doing so, the knife would pass through the chocolate and the top part of the cheesecake cleanly. Then, as I would pull the knife straight back out of the cheesecake, I would clean the knife and put it back in the water for the next cut. The result was a beautifully clean sliced cheesecake. Now I just had to do it with three more cheesecakes.

The cheesecakes were a hit at the event, as was the rest of the food. When asked about the cheesecakes later, I'm told that people's eyes would glaze over when talking about it because they thought the cheesecakes were so good. I can't argue with that sort of praise. I love the recipe too.