4th of July Entremet

Here's a little entremet I made for a 4th of July party. It's vanilla cake layered with cherry mousse and a cherry jam glaze on top.

25 Cake

My friend just reached 25 years working for our theater company! I made her this cute little cake to celebrate. The cake is Mexican chocolate and vanilla with buttercream frosting. The topper is isomalt.

Ancient Red Dragon Cake

Our love of Dungeons and Dragons continues! For her birthday this year, my niece requested an Ancient Red Dragon, guarding a d20, sitting on rocks that spell out “Roll for initiative.” At this point, I’m becoming something of a dragon specialist (see my Frost Dragon Cake and my Norbert(a) Cake), so this seemed well within my skill set.

The chunks of rock themselves are sea foam candy, carved into the shape of the letters, with strips of red and orange LEDs behind them, hooked up to a basic flicker effects controller.

The sides of the d20 are made of gum paste, precut into triangles and assembled around the cake in the center. It turns out that an icosahedron is a very difficult shape to assemble accurately, so I had to do a little shaving and filling to make everything fit, but I was able to mostly hide the imperfections on the back and underside of the die.

I premade the head out of gum paste, so it would be totally dry when I went to assemble the cake. The wings, the spines on its back, and the little fins around the mouth are made of wafer paper (of course with some wire support inside the wings.)

To make the mouth glow, I ran wires down the underside of the belly to a flame simulation LED under the tongue (which is also made of wafer paper). I really wanted smoke to come out of the mouth, too, so I ran a tube up the underbelly and into the mouth as well and hooked it up to the same dry ice fogger I made for the Frost Dragon Cake. The fog didn’t really come out of the mouth, I think because the tube I used was too narrow, so I unhooked it and just made a dramatic atmospheric cloud of fog around the whole scene.

Pusheen Cupcakes

If you haven’t figured it out already from the Rainbow Pusheen Cake, my nephew loves Pusheen. For Christmas, he got a Pusheen calendar that indicates that February 18 is Pusheen’s birthday. So naturally we had to have a party. The cupcake toppers are run-in sugar portraits of all the stuffed Pusheens that he owns, plus Pusheen’s siblings, Pip and Stormy. Happy birthday, Pusheen!

Rainbow Unicorn Pusheen Cake

What’s cuter than Pusheen? That’s right – Rainbow Unicorn Pusheen! Cute cakes aren’t generally my forte, so I’m pretty pleased with how this turned out. The cake is lemon butter cake with white chocolate ganache filling, in rainbow color. The horn, tail, and mane are all royal icing.

Taco Pillow

My nephew asked for a taco pillow for Christmas. I think I did a good job delivering on the request, even though we both agree that it turned out rather larger than we expected.

Castleton Door Hanger

This is a joke that will be very difficult to explain to anyone who is not a member of our family. Suffice it to say that, inspired by an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, we decided to name our house Castleton. So I made this for my sister. It’s freehand cut and routed from poplar.

Dawnbreaker

For Christmas, my niece requested Dawnbreaker, which is a sword from Skyrim. For reference, here is what it looks like in the game.

It’s made primarily of poplar, with sculpted details using a 2-part epoxy clay and leather grip. The magical glowing crystal in the middle is made of a clear plastic ring box, sprayed on the inside with a frost spray paint with a ball of LED fairy lights inside. The orcs in our neighborhood don’t stand a chance.

Holiday Candy 2018

Flavors include coffee-chocolate squares, sesame seed brittle, crème fraîche, cinnamon-marshmallow with chocolate ganache, eggnog, and ginger-rum.

Christmas Pudding

This is the first time I have ever made a legit British pudding!

D20 Pumpkin

We're all about Dungeons and Dragons around here these days and I didn't have much time for pumpkin carving this year, so here's my quick D20 pumpkin.

Mr. Men / Little Miss Cake

I am not personally a fan of the Mr. Men / Little Miss franchise but my friend Isaac is. The cake itself is layers of thin sponge and lemon mousse. The cloud pattern is baked into a thin cake, like you might for a roll cake. The cloud patterned piece is laid around the interior circumference of a springform pan, then inside of that are alternating layers of sponge cake and lemon mousse. On top is an apricot jam glaze colored with food coloring. I’ve never made this kind of cake before. It was both surprisingly easy to do and quite delicious. For the figures, I wanted to try stained glass isomalt. The black lines are piped with royal icing and then I dabbed the melted isomalt in with a toothpick. It worked really well except that I think you are supposed to then put a layer of clear isomalt over the back to hold it all together. Since I didn’t do this, the royal icing joints were definite weak points. The figures are more or less just sitting on top of the cake, which looked great for a few minutes, right up until the royal icing began to dissolve in the glaze. I have had this problem before with royal icing and various other edible substances, but apparently I haven’t yet learned my lesson. Fortunately, everyone got to admire the cake before we had a Mr. Men structural failure and we ate it very shortly thereafter.

Bar Exam Cookies

My good friend just passed the bar exam with flying colors! To congratulate her, I made her these cookies with "Esq." over her initials and her bar exam score.

Frost Dragon Cake

My creative brief for this cake was a frost dragon from Dungeons and Dragons. As far as I was able to discover, there is not actually a canonical frost dragon in D&D, but I found a photo of this figurine and my niece deemed it acceptable so I set about transforming it into cake. 

The interior support structure of the dragon is made of foam core and 1/8” brass rod. The landscape around the dragon is rice krispie treats covered with royal icing, which I applied with an offset spatula then textured with a damp paper towel. The underbelly of the dragon is also made of rice krispie treats, as a result of which I was reminded of a valuable lesson – rice krispie treats don’t stick very well to foam core, at least not well enough to be used upside down, supporting the weight of a layer of fondant. The rice krispie treats began to separate from foam core, resulting in some big cracks on the dragon’s belly. 

Before it got any worse, I added a few more rock formations to support the belly and patched the cracks with royal icing. About 2/3 of the tail is also rice krispie treats and the rest of the tail and body in chocolate cake, covered with fondant. The legs are a 50-50 mix of fondant and gum paste. I did all the scale texture with a highly sophisticated tool that I made by cutting a v-shaped notch into a piece of foam core.

Before I attached the head, a 2-year-old friend who was hanging around our house told me that it looked like a dolphin. She’s not entirely wrong. With the head connected, though, it began to look like a dragon. The head is made of gum paste formed over a mold I made out of foam core. 

The wings are also gum paste, over top of a structure made of wire. The wings were the part I was most nervous about attaching, but they turned out to not be a problem at all. The treasure chest and the coins are also made of gum paste, with royal icing accents on the chest.

Because no dragon is complete without a miasma of ominous fog, I ran a PVC tube under the cake board and up into the treasure chest. I hooked this up to a home-made dry ice fogger, which consisted of a 5-gallon bucket with 3 little fans I had lying around glued into a hole I cut in the side of the bucket and – voila! The fog didn’t last too long, because there was no heating element in the fogger, but it was cool while it lasted.

Guardian Skywatcher Cake

For his 9th birthday, my nephew asked for Guardian Skywatcher from Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. If you aren’t familiar with it, it look something like this:

This was one of those cakes of which I just underestimated the difficulty. In retrospect, the difficulties should have been obvious. The shape of the Guardian Skywatcher is very undercut. It has pieces suspended off the sides by thin supports. The propellers are wide at the tips but narrow in the center. And the entire thing is flying. None of these things are easy to achieve in cake.

Yet I blundered into the project with big ambitions but minimal preparation. Long story short, it was almost, but not quite, a total disaster. Attaching the pieces on the sides was a nightmare. The propellers all broke before the party. Even the pink piping gel I used for the glowing sections faded before the party started. On the bright side, at least the entire structure didn’t collapse, which was a real possibility. Overall, clearly not my strongest work, but my nephew, who is among the sweetest people in the world, loved it anyway.

Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Thunderspears

My niece and nephew are obsessed with Legends of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, so for Christmas I made the real-life versions of one of their favorite weapons from the game – the Thunderspear.

The blade is painted poplar with inset EL wire embedded in resin so that it can light up like the spear in the game. The shaft is a Martha Stewart curtain rod. Please enjoy their dramatic poses.

P.E.K.K.A. Halloween costume

My niece as a P.E.K.K.A. from the video game Clash of Clans. The costume is made almost entirely out of craft foam and hot glue burns.

Entbrat Halloween costume

This is an Entbrat from a video game called My Singing Monsters.

The headpiece is made of foam core and bristol board, with horns sculpted from crumpled newspaper wrapped in masking tape. The whole thing is covered in felt. Lips, tongue, and teeth are made of craft foam colored with marker. The feet are craft foam covered with felt and the rest of the costume is just store-bought shirt and pants with felt leaves glued on and a belly button drawn on.

Miss Fritter Cake

Look – it’s  another Cars-based cake! And one of my best, if I do say so myself. If you’re not an avid follower of the Cars franchise, you might not be familiar with Miss Fritter, so if you need to get up to speed, here’s a video clip.

I’m really happy with how well this one turned out. All the detail is gum paste and royal icing. The hand painting was particularly fun to do.

I also put Lighting McQueen’s number 95 in the middle of the cake because the birthday boy loves numbers.

The nice thing about this cake was that I could just buy the die-cast toy version of Miss Fritter and measure and scale it up. Then I gave the toy to the birthday boy for his present, so it all worked out perfectly.

Here is the cake Miss Fritter next to the toy version I modeled it after and the slightly smaller toy version that the birthday boy already had.

Bluebird Cake

For her granddaughter’s birthday, my friend asked for a cake that somehow combined the themes of bluebirds and the universe.

I came up with this cake that’s sort of a cosmic bluebird in a space nest with planetary eggs in it.

It turned out to be surprisingly elegant, especially when compared to my usual cakes.

The swirl is a gum paste / fondant mix. The planets are isomalt. The bird is gum paste over rice krispie treats. I also put a little blue silhouette of a bird inside the cake.