Owl Themed Craft

For Presh's 2nd birthday we had an owl themed birthday party. I chose owl because her 2nd birthday marked the two year breastfeeding milestone, which is the minimum recommendation for breastfeeding duration made by The World Health Organisation, or WHO as they are more commonly referred as. Who! Who! Get it?

Not only was the owl in the centre on pop-up foam squares, but all her body parts too! Double popped.

For her cake I created my own owl design, using chocolate cake, chocolate icing, seven banana lollies, and two fun sized flake chocolate bars. The eyes were not my own design: two halves of two oreo biscuits and two brown MnMs:

I got the idea from this recipe for owl cupcakes but tweaked it (eg. making a cake instead of cupcakes, using different lollies for ears, talons and beak, adding flake, and cutting two triangles out of the sides to create the illusion of a separate head and body).

It was chocoliciously delicious.

Presh on her birthday in an owl themed dress made for her

Zombie Cupcakes

Happy Haloween, Southern Hemisphereans! (Or Blessed Samhain). This time last year I was using the little recognised or celebrated festival of Samhain in the Southern Hemisphere as an excuse to learn how to craft a new, delicious treat: zombie cupcakes!

White fondant dyed green and molded into the shape of hands, attached to chocolate cupcakes with toothpicks. The broken ground is flake chocolate, painstakingly broken and crushed and chopped into tiny pieces and stuck onto chocolate icing. If I ever make them again, I'm going to do some grave stones on some of them, think it would look even cooler if not all the cupcake graves have been visited by the undead.

Aside from being kinda funky and delicious, these cupcakes were loads of fun. Before devouring the fondant we played many a hand gag with these little babies:

Zombie's gonna get him!

Zombie thinker

For my first go I was pleased with them. I still have work to do on my sculpting, definitely. As they were they were more Hulk than undead, so if I do them again I might add scars and stitches too. Big thanks to Zilly Rosen for her Zombie Cupcakes book, filled with All Hallows Eve themed horror deserts :D What a find, sitting on my table at the library one night I went to study!

Dinosaur Themed Craft

When our eldest was 2-3 years old she had a thing for dinosaurs, one of our favourite interests of hers :) she even has dinosaur bedsheets from that period. When she was 2, my friend Saree designed a dinosaur tail pattern to sew  for her daughter's dress-up collection and she generously shared it (and her felt and cotton and elastic and stuffing and sewing machine!) with me, so that I could make one for my daughter:

This purple tail remains is still a hit with the kids, and hangs on the back of edlests' bedroom door. Actually, writing this has made me think I should get onto making one for our second daughter too.

At the height of her dinosaur phase, we threw edlest a dionsaur themed birthday party. I created these invitations for her guests:

They read "Celebrate 3 years of that 'crazy guy'" because back then she used to refer to herself as "Crazy Guy", it was HILARIOUS, we have no idea where she got it from, but it was apt (well, except for the "guy" part, technically, lol). I had two different sheets of dinosaur themed scarpbook paper, one with larger dinos on it, which I cut all the T-rexes from to create a pop-up on the side. The back of that sheet was brown and patterned and worked with the rest of the colour scheme so I made the number 3s from that. And used the other sheet with small dinosaurs as the background.

I also used magnetic strips on the back of the invitations so they would stick to the fridge themselves. And I wacked all the details such as time, date and address on the photo of her.

For her birthday cake, I invested in a Wilton dinosaur cake pan and embarked on piping for the very first time (this was at the start of 2011). 

Once I got the hang of piping (I made many a practice dinosaur cake. By the time her party came, our family was so sick of cake lol!) I found that it wasn't challenging, just time consuming. But for how it looks at the end, it's really ace. I'm a bit of a fan of the Wilton cake pans and their piping instructions.

I had worried that it would be a waste buying a cake pan just to use for one birthday, but I was happily wrong. I've made many a dinosaur cake for friends birthdays and loaned the cake pan to others and I have no doubt we'll use it again for our second born at some stage and this baby still in my belly, some day.

And thus concludes my dinosaur crafting to date :)

Lego Cake

I came across edible lego cakes (as opposed to cakes built from real lego) in 2011  and knew I had to make one for Saree's next birthday as she openly admits the lego she buys her children is a gift to herself foremost ;) I made two different sized rectangular cakes, cut them up into as even portions as I could manage without using a leveler ;) Gave them a "crumb coat" which I learned from this video and stuck them in the fridge. After the cakes cooled in the fridge, I made blue, yellow and red butter cream icing, iced the cakes, iced the marshmellows and stuck them into the cakes using tooth picks.

I love the concept of lego cake, but I wasn't entirely happy with the end result. I hate smoothing icing. I suck at it and all I can think when I look at the pictures of this cake is how much more work it needed to look the way I wanted it to. I finished the cake about an hour, hour and a half before we had to go to Saree's for dinner, and I spent that hour/hour and a half touching up, I could not stop!

Saree was pleased with her lego cake. My eldest was inspired to create a lego cake of her own (sort of, lol):

But unlike me, she was pleased with her end result. I could learn a lot from this kid!

I think if I try the lego cake again, I'll see how much smoother I can get it with fondant instead of butter cream. 

Naming Day Invitations & Cakes

About three months after our children are born, Huz and I host a naming day (for want of a name for the day lol). Shortly after their births' I send out hand made invitations to the naming days, featuring a melt-in-your-mouth image of our newborn. For our eldest I had a ton of this adorable black and pink paper:

 

For our second, I went with blue and brown (which I've always adored together). I was really drawn to blue when I was pregnant with her, and I've never really loved the colour beforehand. It's always been one of "her colours".

I hope we manage to get a photo as adorable as these two, for baby 3's naming day invites in a few months time!

On the day I make personalised cakes for our guests. Our eldest's naming day came before I'd tried my hand at cake decorating (I didn't even know how to make icing back then! I had help from a friend writing my baby's name on these cupcakes, lol):

photo by Laura Baker

Our family on edlest's naming day, photo by Laura Baker

By the time we had our second child's naming day, I'd had a few years of cake decorating under my belt. I bought a set of alphabet cake pans. I said to Huz "They're such great value! I can use them to spell anything in cake in English, French, Spanish, German and Indonesian" ;) I used the pans to spell out her first name in cake. Originally I planned to have her first and second name, but it ended up being quite a bit of cake, just having her first name there! Each pan in about the size of a hand.

After cooking the cakes and letting them cook, I covered them in white chocolate ganache to use as an adhesive for fusing fondant to cake. It tasted amazing, and it didn't ooze when pressed, like butter cream, and was thinner than butter cream, which I liked. But it wasn't as good at sticking as butter cream.

I spent an exorbitantly long time rolling out the fondant and making sure the blue food dye spread evenly (while I dyed the fondant myself, I did not make it, I bought it from my local cake guy). Then I divided it (1.5kgs of sticky, dense fondant) into seven evenly sized balls

This was my first attempt at covering cakes in fondant and it was quite tricky because of all the nooks and crannies each letter had. When I finished, they looked a little plain so I added a border of white butter cream stars, to give it a finishing touch.

And the only photo of our family all together on that day, lol:

I'll definitely use the alphabet cake pans to create the soon-to-be-born babe's name in cake, but will use different coloured fondant, butter cream for adhesive and not too sure about borders or other embellishments, you'll just have to wait and see ;)

Spaceship Cake

This spaceship cake, in honour of our eldests' 4th birthday, had been a long time coming. In fact, the day after her 3rd birthday she informed me that in 365 days, she'd be having a spaceship cake at a "picnic, wif fwenz". Throughout 2011 she would sit with me and demand we google for spaceship cake images and tell me which designs she liked and which weren't up to scratch, lol. 

In the end we chose this cake to model our own design on. This was the first big cake I've decorated with fondant. I got two new cake pans for the project: an octagon and a set of two half-spheres which when stuck together make ball shaped cakes. I used one sphere to make the dome of the spaceship. I covered the cakes in a thin layer of butter cream to act as an adhesive for the fondant. And I cheated by buying already-coloured fondant in black so I didn't have to colour it myself (which takes forever!)

After applying the black fondant, I used black dyed butter cream to stick MnMs to the cakes, to make the appearance of multicoloured lights on our spaceship. I also added some lines of black butter cream to give the ships definition. The birthday girl was so taken with the brain slug cakes I made the previous year for Huz, talking about them often, so I decided to make some of the slug aliens to go with her spaceships, I think they really finished the cakes off nicely:

Cake 1 - afternoon party Photo by India Dechrai

1 cake for her picnic, the other for after dinner with friends & family at work during the day

cake 2 - dinner party

I even attached brake lights, a different colour from the rest of the lights #nerdalert.

 

When it came to cake time at her picnic, we couldn't light the candles due to the wind, so she happily pretended to blow her candles out :) She was DE-lighted to get her hands on a fondant brain slug again:

photos by India Dechrai

 And we did it all again after dinner that night with our friends and family who couldn't make the picnic because it was during business hours.