Monkey Cake

Monkey cake was a 1st birthday cake for a cute little baby girl.  I worked on it all day Saturday and delivered it this morning to her family.  Hope they enjoyed it!

The design was based on an image I found of Hello Kitty dressed up in a monkey costume.  I just left out the whiskers and the bow.  It kind of looks like a monkey, right?  A really cute anime monkey?

It was a two-layer fudge marble cake with a butter cream coating and outer coating of chocolate fondant.  The belly face, hands, and feet were vanilla marshmallow fondant.  The pink ears were strawberry fondant.

I ended up giving Monkey a teeny chocolate belly button, which is unfortunately not pictured here.  I think the belly button made the cake over-the-top cute.

Happy Birthday, little cutie!

October's Over

And I think we all truly enjoyed this month.  It was a very busy one.  We had two family birthdays, a lot of Hallowe'en preparation, and finally Hallowe'en itself.  In our neighborhood, there are only really any trick-or-treaters up on Main St., so the kids ran off with dad and left me alone with an entire plate of pumpkin rice krispie treats staring me in the face.  My mission was to pass out candy to any possible trick-or-treaters, but we didn't have a single one while they were gone.

 If you don't know me very well, you may be wondering how one makes pumpkin rice krispie treats.  Well, I'm not entirely sure either, but somehow or another, I played with my marshmallow recipe in such a way that I ended up making marshmallows from actual pumpkin pulp.  I used all the traditional pumpkin pie spices, so it really was like a pumpkin pie with the texture of a fresh marshmallow.  After a weenie roast and a few pumpkin marshmallow chai lattes, I had just enough marshmallows remaining for a batch of rice krispies.  Seemed appropriate for the occasion.

Like I said before, October is a busy month.  Below, my mother's birthday cake this year...

I did this one much like a cake from a year ago.  It's a basic yellow cake with a crumb coating of buttercream and a poured coating of dark chocolate ganache.  I studded the top with gold, orange, and red roses.  This was my first effort at roses in such a long time.  I get out of practice, unfortunately.  Mom seemed very pleased with her cake, though.  I had long wanted to do this for her.  After all my life, every year a wonderful birthday cake made by mom, now this.  Me returning the favor.

Continuing along that same line, I made a lovely, though much simpler birthday cake the following week for my mother-in-law.  The main artistry in this cake lies in the extraordinarily lemony pound cake, made from scratch and filled with a layer of lemon curd.  I then sprinkled the top with powdered sugar and a handful of raspberries.  I think all the motherly figures in my life were pleased by their birthday cakes this year.  October is full of challenges, but I rose to them this year.  Including the insanity of carving four pumpkins.  What was I thinking?  Well, Michael and Bryce did help on some of this...

Bryce's Dagobah Cake

Bryce always has very specific ideas about what he wants on his birthday cake.  I love this about Bryce.  I'm all too keen to accommodate his every bizarre whim.  So, when he said, "I want Dagobah," I was psyched.

He supplied the Star Wars action figures and I supplied the crazy swamp goo.  I whipped out my entire candy making arsenal on this one.  From the caramel sauce pool Yoda is standing in to the chocolate plastic gnarl trees that sprout from the swamp cake, this cake was treated with every skill I'd developed over the last year or so.

The white gooey stuff is marshmallow sauce and the frosting is my mom's traditional buttercream.  I also embellished with a few color-coordinated gummi worms.

Check out the lime Jello swamp goo on the X-Wing fighter!  Luke looks a little out of scale, but Bryce didn't care.  He was totally into the chocolate plastic gnarl trees.  Snarfed one down right after we sang the birthday song.