Butterfly Cupcakes

A surprisingly easy treat just using melting chocolate wafers again from the hello cupcake book. Outlined the wings in brown chocolate, filled it in with orange, and then used a toothpick to pull the brown chocolate into the orange. Made antennae too, but they kept breaking so I gave up.

Grandma's Knitting, Sewing, and Beading Birthday Cake

 

Grandma has always been a knitter and a sewer, and recently has gotten into beading. So we took all her favorite things and put them on a cake. Here's some notes about how we did it ...

Big General Hints: 

• Adhere the complicated pieces on to thin pieces of rolled out "rolled fondant" so that you can play around with the layout before sticking it to the icing. A pastry wheel is a great tool to cut out wavy lines of fondant so your pieces look nice before placing. Took me a long time to figure out how to lay everything out (our cake was too small) and having stuff on fondant made a big difference. In retrospect the beads were probably a bit too much, but the kids had worked so hard on them we couldn't leave them out.
• To make holes in beads, you can use a drinking straw, or a metal pastry bag decorating tip
• Rolling pin rings let really little kids do all the rolling they want without making the pastry (or in this case, "rolled fondant" ) too thin. Actually, I use them even when I don't have kids helping!
• We made this cake over a two week period and froze lots of the components as we made them, only defrosting at the end to put the whole thing together. 
• Now that I'm officially obsessed with cupcake and cake making, I bought a cupcake carrier. I was torn between the Chefmate one (which is a Target home brand, though it seems to be also available as an oneida one) and the Wilton ultimate 3-in-1 cake caddy. The Chefmate/Oneida one holds 24 standard cupcakes (but nothing else). The Wilton one is designed to carry 12 regular cupcakes, 24 mini cupcakes, or a regular cake and also seems somewhat sturdier. The big downside of the Wilton is that the cupcake supports are really shallow, while the Chefmate/Oneida holes are much deeper. So I bought the Chefmate one. You can put an aluminum 1/4 sheet pan (which is slightly smaller than a 13x9 pan) into it if you fold up the edges. I also got a thin flexible placemat that I trimmed to the size of the base, and a cake could sit on that without the pan. We left our cake in the pan in the end because we had to really cram bits on it.

Spool of Thread:

• To make the spool: "Glue" (with melted chocolate chips) two mini nilla wafers onto a tootsie roll.
• Use  "rolled fondant" like playdough and make something that looks like a needle. I used a toothpick to make the eye of the needle.
• To make the thread: Roll out "rolled fondant" thin and then slice it into narrow strips with the straight edge of a pastry wheel. Roll it around the needle and spool.

 Knitting Needles and Balls of Wool:

• Go out and buy What's New Cupcake? -- directions are in there, but the basics are as follows:
• Needles:  Pringles "stix" (or pocky) dipped in melted chocolate with a (american style) smartie "glued" on the end with melted chocolate (somehwhat of a challenge) and then redipped.
• Wool: mini cupcake iced, then melting wafer in the middle and pipe melted chocolate wafers back and forth in lines (my 8-year-old did much of this)

Knitting:

• Just used melted chocolate wafers in a zip lock bag and piped the design one loopy row at a time. 
• I actually tried to knit licorice laces on chopsticks for "true" knitting and it was a total flop (you can knit them, but they don't lay flat). Next time (ha ha) I'm going to try these laces that were recommended by a friend.

Mega beads:

• I made a bunch of these (and they're yummy) but they were too big for the necklace by the time I started laying everything out, so I just stuck a couple on the cake in the end. 
• Cut half inch slices of pound cake, and use mini-cookie-cutters to cut out shapes. Make a hole in the middle with a drinking straw and dip in melting chocolate.
• Getting them out of the melted chocolate was tough. Next time I'm going to try freezing them first.

Happy Birthday Grandma Sewing:

• I rolled the "rolled fondant" thin and then used a "letter press set" to make the outlines of the letters in the fondant. Then I piped melting chocolate to look like stitches.
• I tried hard to find a way to really sew licorice laces into the fondant, but it just kept tearing so eventually I gave up.

Necklace of Beads: 

• In addition to the mega-beads I made, the kids spent a lot of time making beads out of "rolled fondant" It's very much like playdough, with the added bonus that they have to knead it for a little bit, then knead in the  food coloring (which can result in colored hands too) and then make beads. Mostly with cookie cutters, but some just formed by hand. Poked holes in the middle with a drinking straw.
• Also bought lots of cookies, gummy savers, and other candy that we cut poke holes into. 
• Threaded them all onto the red licorice lace.
• Placing this on the cake was actually the most difficult layout task. Took two people, one holding the necklace in the air and the other pressing the beads into the icing.