Lady Bugs & Fondant

I did it. I made lady bug fondant cupcakes. It took me a while and the fondant was annoying at first because I wasn't used to it. I did a little bit of research on the best tasting fondant and everything I found online said that Duff Goldman's line of butter cream fondant tastes the best. The last thing I wanted was to have disgusting, foul smelling fondant on my cupcakes. I tried a little and it tastes like candy corn! It must have been delicious because Lilly ate the entire lady bug off of her cupcake. This post will be mostly photos of my fondant lady bug cupcakes. So here they are... (I went a little Instagram crazy...)

These are just the fondant toppers before I placed them on the cupcakes

After Assembling the cupcakes

Cupcakes on display st the party

My cupcakes with the professional cake by wedding cake baker/designer Edith Hall in the background

Me posing with my delicious little masterpieces!

So I discovered I do like to work with fondant. This is good because yesterday I was asked to make a two tier pink and black zebra birthday cake for someone in my office. They need it tomorrow. I am freaking out a little bit, but I am also really excited! I hope it turns out OK. I'll post some photos after I finish which will probably be very late tonight...

Spider Cupcakes II

So I made the cupcakes. I had to change a few things though. For instance, I made this big deal about accuracy and spiders having 8 legs. That only works if you buy enough pocky to make a zillion legs. I bought 3 boxes. I should have bought about 6 boxes, so my spiders have only six legs. I was WAY too lazy to make the eyes from chocolate, so I found some sugar “creature features” at Michael's that Wilton makes to use as the eyes. Also, I couldn’t find black cupcake liners (well I could have, but I forgot to look while I was at Michael's and didn't feel like going back over there), so I used black liners that had a Halloween pattern on them instead. The cupcake batter sort of soaks into the liner so it’s still really dark anyway.

I brought the cupcakes in to work early this morning and heard someone say “Whoa! Who made these spider cupcakes!?”  SUCCESS.

Above: Aren't they beautiful?

Below: Lilly "helping" by eating the cupcake batter

Above: The eyes I used

Below: Spiders pre-legs

Below: Assembling legs

I'd say my awesomeness level is pretty high.

Halloween Spider Cupcakes

I really wanted to make some type of Halloween cupcake this year, so I Googled "Halloween cupcakes" and found a bunch of photos that gave me some ideas. 

I am really scared of spiders. Some of them jump, some are poisonous, some are the size of my head. I am really scared that a spider the size of my head with giant fangs filled with poison venom will jump and fly at my face while making a screeching sound and then chew my head off. Or something equally as ridiculous, yet scary enough to make me shudder. So, naturally I am fascinated by them and I decided to make spider cupcakes.

I looked around for the best way to make them and I like the use of Pocky for the spiders legs the best instead of limp licorice or straight pretzels...

Here is a random story before we get started... last year I put a fake spider on the windowsill thinking it would scare Andy, which it did not. The fake spider however is still there and has gathered dust, so it's started looking a little hairy and a little more real. At least once a month I go to open the window, forgetting it's there, and it scares the crap outta me. I have successfully scared the crap out of myself with this stupid fake spider at least six times. And yet I leave it there on the windowsill. 

Ok, here we go...

Disclaimer: I haven't made these yet. I hope to make them this weekend. I have no idea how they will turn out, so I wish you luck if you decide to try this before I do.

Ingredients:

2 Boxes Chocolate cake mix

24 Black cupcake liners

A bunch of brown/black sprinkles

White chocolate for melting

Milk chocolate for melting

Chocolate frosting

Vanilla frosting

4 to 6 Boxes of chocolate Pocky

1 Bag candy corn

1 Piping bag with small round tip

Most of the above quantities are total estimations. Good luck.

You might need at least an hour to two hours for this project.

Makes approx 24 cupcakes. Probably more. 

Directions:

1. Make cupcake mix as directed on box

2. Fill each cupcake liner in pan about 3/4 with cake batter. You need to fill the liners higher than usual so that you have rounded tops later.

3. Bake as directed on box (might need a few extra minutes in oven)

4. Take out of oven and let cool

5. Assemble legs from Pocky and melted milk chocolate. Let dry on wax paper. I would go into detail on how this is done but I just don't feel like it at the moment.

6. Make the white chocolate dots for the eyes on wax paper from melted white chocolate (can use a different color such as yellow, green or red for eyes if desired)- Let the white dots harden then add little milk chocolate dots on the larger white dots. This works best with a piping bag. Let dry on the wax paper. 

7. Frost the cupcakes generously with the chocolate frosting. 

8. Fill a small wide bowl with chocolate sprinkles.

9. Dip frosted side of each cupcake in the sprinkles rolling it around to cover.

10. Carefully push the Pocky legs into the cupcakes. It might be helpful to make holes for the legs first. Remember: Spiders have 8 legs and if you're going for accuracy, so should your cupcakes.

11. Using the piping bag, add a small dot of vanilla frosting for each eye and attach eyes. The frosting is your glue. You can finally eat glue. You should feel happy about this.

12. You can add candy corn fangs or other features if desired. Use the piping bag and pipe on small dots of icing to attach fangs and other random things you come up with right now because you want to keep attaching things since you're having so much fun.

13. Admire and eat your spider-cakes. Do not eat the cupcake liners. They don't taste very good.

Now for your enjoyment, a few Halloween photos from my childhood:

I'm the one in the poodle skirt. My sister is Pebbles Flintstone. Batman and the devil are our friends Alanna and Julian.

With my cousin, Laurin, when we were like two and half. I am Minnie Mouse and she is an inside out shirt. Really though I'm not sure what she was supposed to be. Maybe a ghost? I am not sure she remembers either.

Number 4: Continued

I tasted a cupcake. It was good. I would buy that $7.99 cupcake mix again, but only for a special occasion because I am not made of money (but I just pictured what I'd look like if I was...). The cupcakes with the eggs on top have a Cadbury cream eggs in the center. Um, yeah, they do. Which brings me to a goal I'd like to add: Bake things into cupcakes. I will first try to put peanut butter cups in there. What else can I bake into a cupcakes? Hmmmmmmmmmmm...

The next goal I will tackle is number 21: Try Sushi.

Number 4: “Learn To Use/Make Fondant/Modeling Chocolate”

To start: What is Modeling Chocolate? and What is Fondant?


I am a product of America and generation Y or X or Q (or whatever, I have no idea actually, which generation I am a “product of” I just liked the way that sounded). being American and of this generation (whichever one it was) we were always told (and I believed) "you can do anything!" And for some reason one of those things I believed was that I was a dessert decorating wizard. This of course was never true. My little sister is way better at it than me, at both baking and decorating. I am pretty mediocre. I don’t know just when it was that I became so delusional. In my mind baking was MY thing that she so rudely ripped out from under me by being so suddenly awesome at it. In reality, aside from her natural talents (she is naturally quite talented at this sort of thing), she took months and months of Wilton cake decorating classes, majored in food sciences in college, and even studied cooking in Florence, Italy for a few months. I was really just jealous when my little sister surpassed my mediocre cake decorating abilities and became more awesome than me at something (She is actually more awesome than me at a lot of things). But looking back on our childhood and teenage years, she was always cooking and baking (hence her choice to study it in college). I can count on one hand the number of cakes I baked and decorated. I think I made 3. THREE. Yup that’s it. I really admire my sister’s abilities and am so impressed by all the cakes she makes. If I could learn to be half as awesome as her, my cakes and cupcakes would seriously ROCK. So I have a lot of baking related goals on my list. Some are things that sounded cool to me. Some things I just like to eat or want to taste. This particular goal is just the beginning of my baking and decorating adventures!

So the modeling chocolate thing was not going well already. Well the cupcake part was not going as planned anyway. I had baked the cupcakes on Tuesday night so they would be ready when my friend, KC, came over to teach me how to make and use the modeling chocolate on Wednesday. Why is it no one sells regular cake mix anymore? Only extra moist or moist? Those are NOT good for decorating cupcakes or cakes. Before I baked the cupcakes, KC had suggested I also make a pound cake mix and add a little bit of that in there because that would solve the moist gooey problem that occurs when using the moist or extra moist cake mixes. I looked everywhere for pound cake mix and I couldn’t find any. So I just baked the cupcakes without it. I went home to have some lunch on Wednesday. While I was there I decided to check on the cupcakes. I had put them in a container before they even had a chance to cool so that I could go to bed. Well, they were all moist and gooey on top which is the WORST THING EVER for icing cupcakes. The icing just sticks and pulls the top layer of cupcake off and it is stupid. Just plain stupid. I decided to leave the cupcakes out of the box and hopefully the moistness would dry or go away or something.


The moistness did not completely go away by the time I got home form work so I took the baby (I guess she would be a toddler now) and we went out in search of pound cake mix. I ended up finding the most expensive cake mix I had ever seen, a box of Duff Goldman's white cake mix for $7.99. Yup, $7.99. I thought, This stuff had better be good! Well, I got home and baked it and turns out if was perfect for what I needed it for. I still haven't tasted it yet though... 

KC was running a little late, but when she arrived I was totally ready to go. It turns out modeling chocolate is not as difficult as I had originally anticipated and it’s totally fun! It tastes like tootsie rolls and is as fun as playdough! It’s made from corn syrup and chocolate. We colored it lime green, neon yellow, neon, blue, and neon pink because those were the colors we had. I decided I wanted to make little flower shapes because I wanted to keep it simple on my first attempt and I found these cute little flower shaped cookie type cutters that are used for fondant and modeling chocolate.

We also made icing. Which, again, was even easier than I thought. I don’t know if I’ll be buying store bought icing anymore. Unless I am in a hurry I guess.  

The cupcakes turned out pretty and cute! Thanks KC for all your help!!! I hope they taste good. I am a little nervous about the taste since I have never used that cake mix before, never made icing before, and obviously never made modeling chocolate before either. I guess we shall see tonight…

Here is a pic of the cupcakes and a little of the "process":

So, Ilyssa, How are my cupcakes? Did I do a good job?