Cake #13 - OK not a "cake" - but my super summer frosted sugar cookies - Surfboards and Flipflops.

Cake #13 - March 2014

* All items in the picture were mine except the red tray of "lolipops" made by another really creative mom. 

This was a very ambitious, but all in all, fun project initiated by our Father/Daughter - Mother/Son Dance that our school held this year for the second time, and this year  with a Hawaiian Luau theme. It was chaired by my sister-in-law and I agreed to help on her committee. I was tasked with getting some snacky type baked goods, since that's my "thing". (No meal at this event, just snacks.) I looked at Costco and just choked, not finding anything THAT good, and realizing like always, a great baked good at a party can also act as a wonderful decoration and centerpiece too. So I figured if I planned ahead well enough, I could just as easily make something great myself and so I did. I knew little kids liked easy to hold and pick up things, and often didn't eat that much of it, so I wanted a mini cupcake and then decided on sugar cookies too. I did make the cupcakes (see below) but which weren't as fun or cool as the cookies.)

I decided on a basic sugar cookie recipe and the flooding technique of frosting--where you make your frosting a little thinner than usual, and pipe it on the edges first. Then you flood the center of the iced-edged cookie to cover the cookie. Some were great..just the right consistency of the frosting, and you could hardly tell the piped edges from the middle.  Some were too watery so the edges were way more visible (the green batch for example), so I have some work to do on perfecting the frosting technique. At one point, I decided to use the "contrast" method if you can't get a "match" and thus piped a distinctly different color on the edge of some of the flip flops (see yellow) and a lighter color flooded in the middle. That actually added some pizzaz, and variety in the design, which made everything richly colorful.

First I went to work on finding what cookie cutters were available and found an inexpensive surfboard and flip flop online and had them shipped. They arrived quickly,  without my paying extra for fast shipping. It's amazing how many different cookie cutter shapes you can get very easily nowadays. I couldn't decide between them so I got both. In hindsight, I wish I knew what size they were in reality, as the flip flop was actually proportionally bigger than the surfboard so they didn't work together that well. So I decided to make one tray of flip flop cookies (maybe for the Father/DAUGHTER event)  and another "tray" of the surfboards (maybe for the Mother/SON event.) Eventually I just did some of each for each event.

The "trays" were actually the really creative part of it all, and that's because I got the idea to serve  all these cookies, on the "sand" at the beach.  And for "sand" I decided to use brown sugar because it looks like sand,  it's safe to put food in it, it's sticky enough to hold the cookies sort of firmly, but not too much, and it's actually edible (and yummy, and goes with the cookies if any gets on one)  plus  you can get a really big bag of it rather inexpensively. 

So I made my cookies on one day, and iced them the next.

I decided that the flip flops would go on this really cool Hawaiian style plastic, retro tray (a really large one) I had just gotten as a gift at Sam's Club for my birthday--ok I bought it for myself for my birthday. :-) So I put some "sand" down and started to lay the cookies "on the sand." It fit perfectly, though until it was completely full and covered with plastic wrap, they did tend to slide around a little bit. 

I then saw some inexpensive dollar store sand pails (it was around Easter time) and got me four of them. I figured I would fill them with the "sand" and stick the surfboards in it--8 to 10 boards per pail should do. (Then I would use them as actual Easter baskets (or heck, beach sand pails) after we were done with them in this project!) But alas I also figured I didn't want to spend/waste THAT much brown sugar in each pail, so decided to buy some bulk flour and put a large ziploc bag full of the flour in the bottom of each pail first just to take up a lot of the space. (I did have to really squeeze the air out of the bags to ensure the brown sugar sat down all the way in the pail.) By putting it in the plastic bags, I would seal it so I could use/reuse it for baking later without actually wasting it if I hadn't bagged it. (I have just finished using the last of the flour in those bags at Thanksgiving!) Then I would pour the brown sugar over that so only the top 3" or so of the sugar would hold the cookies upright, and be what's visible.

 Lastly, I needed a finishing touch of a "Surf's Up" sign or something (we used "Hang Ten", "Life's a Beach" and "Aloha" too) and that's where my artsy girls came in to make them for me, then mount them on construction paper, and then tape them to straws which we then inserted in the sand. 

Voila. Pretty awesome finished product, AND had to do it all twice--as the Mother/Son event was on one day and the Father/Daughter on an entirely different day a week apart! 

Whew. Glad that month is over.

AND, if that weren't enough, I did make the Hawaiian colored mini cupcakes to go with it all too. It was very hot out for the first event, so I worried the buttercream would melt in transport.  So this time, I  frosted them all, and put them in the freezer a few hours before transport. That way I got them to the school courtyard and displayed on their stand without too much risk of mushing them. The frosting was my normal buttercream, with a spray color tint in the darker "island" colors.

I just happened to have some plain red plastic plates (i.e. less chance of breaking in transport and around kids, than glass) and borrowed my sister's triple tier plate stand that they were displayed and served on. (I do have my eye on one of my own --with little beads and stuff--that I am hoping Santa brings me for Christmas ;-) --Meg, if you want the link, I will email it to you! Love MOM. 

 ALOHA until next year's event!

Cake #12 - Easter - Blue and Yellow Peeps Cake - with chocolate dyed ribbon bow and little peeps cupcakes

Cake #12 - Easter - The Blue and Yellow Peeps Cake with chocolate dyed ribbon bow, and little peeps cupcakes. (April 2014.)


For Easter, which for the first time we agreed to do at a park--another transportation potential debacle--I made this blueberry white cake with blueberry cream filling, and the good buttercream, dyed blue. The peeps were an easy and colorful addition, though it was hard to find the yellow chicks at the last minute. (Needed chicks, not bunnies for the cake..though bunnies worked best on the cupcakes.)

The bow was the second time I tried this, and it worked quite well, despite again that we were jiggling this case in transit a lot. To make the chocolate bows, you melt and dye your candy chocolates -- white chocolates in this case--and then paint the melted candy onto wax paper strips, and then while still not cool, bend them with the tips together but leaving the bow "hole" and putting them on their side to dry. I made extras, knowing quite well I would break one or more, especially in transit. I can't remember if I did. What I do remember is that the kids ate most of the cupcakes but that due to all of the other goodies at our Easter pot luck, sadly there was a lot of cake left that after "keeping" it for awhile, had to be discarded...

Cake #11 - Mary Ellen's 3rd birthday Princess Heart Cake -(How on earth did we get away with a cake that wasn't "Frozen??" )

Cake #11 - Mary Ellen's Princess Heart Cake

Sweet little Mary Ellen's birthday party this year was at a park..a really nice small park in Placentia. We'd been there when the kids were all little in preschool, and Kath had the great idea to do her birthday at the same park. Bathrooms are nice and close, as is the playground, with plenty of shade, picnic tables and BBQs. However, like most "off site" birthdays, I always get nervous when making anything too fancy, due to the obvious car transportation (and weather--usually heat) issues.

I remember (all too well) Mary Ellen's cake last year..the beautiful Barbie Doll cake, which I will post great pictures of shortly, but which, after arriving at the YMCA for her party, began to melt and the frosting skirt of the dress slid right  down. (I tried to refrigerate it quickly and then "re-slide" it up gently, but I was still not happy with the way it held up.)  And that was after we'd driven only 4 or 5 miles and less than 10 minutes in the car, with her on my lap since she was so tall there was no way of encasing her in anything. The jiggling of the car ride, I am sure, contributed greatly to the slippage of her dress. 

Yes, that's the drawback of true buttercream, and why many decorators would go with fondant or the meringue type icing..but those just don't taste as good to me. That's why a good cake  does take some planning to make sure you've got it ready for the right situation. This time, this involved my buying another plastic cake transporter. I already had a smaller one and a good set of cupcake boxes...Wilton makes the best, most sturdy, reliable, and easy to clean things...you can usually get them online or at Michael's. But the new tranport box made it easy to get my princess heart cake and all the cupckes to the park without any trouble. Fortunately I did take this one picture..almost forgot entirely. 

 This was a pink 2 layer heart shaped cake with a basic frosting filling. I am pretty sure the filling was purple which went classically with the pink princess theme

 



 And of course, for the little hands, I had to include 2 dozen princess cupcakes. I think the piped, swirled frosting and the little crown pics gave it a royal appearance!