Happy Meal McNugget 'Cake'

Oh boy. This was a fun one. I'm calling it a successful failure... my plans for this 'cake' were far greater than I achieved, however, I'm so thrilled about the look of the McNuggets that I'm over it!

Besides, I've realized that whenever I do a test cake.. the second cake ends up at least 500x better (examples? the Quilt before and after and Rubber Ducky before and after cakes) - so I'm confident if I were to do it again, I would get what I had originally envisioned, and that's good enough for me right now.

The plan was a Happy Meal - for Ryan (of cakes past). As he correctly guessed, it was a poke at the fact that he doesn't ever eat more than a kid (Des once ate more than him...)

The Failure:
I had hoped to have a happy meal box, built much like a gingerbread house over the vanilla cake, frosted with chocolate icing. I had also planned a McNugget box as well - both of these were casualties of icing crappiness, and last minute doing of things. I should have done more ahead of time.

The frosting was done all in an hour or two - and because I was semi-rushed, that meant that the colours bled and things just weren't as sharp as I would hope.

The Success:
The chicken nuggets and fries! OMG love it!

Served with chocolate syrup "BBQ Sauce", the fried cake nuggets (yes, yes I DID fry cake and it was everything I wanted it to be) are dead ringers for chicken nuggets! The fries were cookies - baked long and slow to brown them), glazed and sugared to give that oily shine, and salty look. They were served with some tube frosting "Ketchup".

Dan stepped in on this project and made me a fry bag and cup out of French butter cookies (much like fortune cookies). And it was awesome. He also did some cool design things that I might have to make him do for future projects.


Oh and yes, that's a happy meal toy on top of the cake.

Easter Cookies

After receiving one of the cookie bags that I made for the baby shower last week - my friend Darlena asked if she could put in an order for herself - HECK YEAH!
80 cookies total (plus an additional 24 that I made *just in case*), it's been far more work that I thought it would be (if they had all been the same one or two designs it would have been infinitely easier) but I'm done, a day early - and pretty happy with the results!
I learned, as always, a lot - and I can see a noticable difference in the first cookies I decorated vs the 100th (bees and ducks were last, bunny was first). Also - I got to use mys himmer dust on the inset wings, and I almost never get to use that stuff.

She's giving most of these away as gifts, but liked the cookies themselves so much, she divulged some would make it to her own freezer.

The colouring and shimmer doesn't come through well in photos - but the lines you see inthe frosting are colour from the dust, and the whole wing glimmers like ruby slippers...







Would you believe that I hardly ate any?
Eh, me either.. about 5 made it into my tummy over the three days of preparation.

Snowman

The evening before his work holiday party - Dan mentioned that there was a desert contest. Damnit. He hada good idea too - a snowman cake! And so it goes.

He was baked in mixing bows of various sizes. He's white chocolate cake on the bottom, and gingerbread cake on top. My favorite swiss buttercream makes up the snow, and his arms are chocolate coated pretzles. He has a large support dowel down his center, but i should perhapse have attatched it to the base, because he still started to "melt"

He did win me 20 bucks though.

Crayon Cake

While she was learning her colours, Des would default everything to green if she didn't know what the color was, hence the green crayon! Des painted the Pooh Bear colouring page with dyed royal icing. 

The cake itself was Green Velvet (read: Red Velvet, but.. green!) and baked in a large can. I must say, I do not recommend baking cakes in tin cans - the heat distribution is all wrong and ends up producing not-so-leavened cakes. The tip was baked in an aluminum disposable pan which I molded into the shape I wanted. Again, not suggested - that part of the cake was a solid mass.

Somehow, the part of the cake served was actually good, lucky me!  

While I was assembling before the party, there was a big moment of "I can't do this. This sucks. $*@()!! Daaaann.. is it too late to go pick up some cakes from the store?" Dan, being excellent, promptly went out and procured some cakes. While he was gone I started to get very angry with myself for giving up and decided that there was no way Des's birthday cake would be from a store! Not after I've come so far!

So I finished it! BWAHAHAHAHA.. yeeeah...

Also, I made blue peanut butter ice cream and red mint fudge ice cream to be served with it -obviously a colour theme! I also wouldn't really suggest the heavily dyed ice cream...