Ghostie

Another giant stuffie for my nephew! This year, he wanted the ghost from the video game Forager. It's very soft and squishy and perhaps a little larger than I expected it to be.

Fabstaff

Yet another video game inspired wooden weapon! This is my IRL interpretation of the Fabstaff from the Calamity Mod of Terreria. The staff is poplar and the crystal at the top is lexan colored with Sharpie.

Holiday Candy 2019

Most years, I make candies to send to friends and family over the holidays. This year, I got a new great new book called Spice, so I tried a bunch of new spice combinations. Starting with the pink marshmallows in the upper left and moving down and then to the right, the flavors are: mulled wine marshmallows, tamarind garam masala marshmallows, cardamom sesame brittle, rice pudding white chocolate ganache, spiced apple caramel, spiced milk chocolate ganache, and dark chocolate mole bark.

Yiga Blademaster Halloween costume

This Halloween, I made my nephew a Yiga Blademaster costume from Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It’s made from two body suits sewn together, with accents of faux leather, craft foam, and feathers. The windcleaver sword is made of poplar.

Isaac Caboom Cake

Based on Duke Caboom from Toy Story 4, the figure on top of my Isaac Caboom cake was supposed to do a daredevil jump off the end of the cake. Like many of my cake mechanisms, it sort of worked eventually, but not as well as I had hoped. Which is pretty on brand, both for me and for Duke Caboom.

The cake is lemon cake with raspberry mint white chocolate ganache. The red, yellow, and orange piece on top is isomalt. The guy is made out of gum paste with royal icing detail piped on top.

Brain Chocolates

My friend was having brain surgery. My way of showing support was to send her brain-shaped chocolates.

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.