May The Fourth Be With You...

Okay, so I'm a little late.

But on the fourth, I was kind of busy.  See, it's not only Star Wars day, it's also my birthday.  And also the birthday of my cousin's teenage daughter.  Since it fell on a weekend this year, we decided to share a party - and make it Star Wars themed!

This was our cake:

I know, he has no legs.  I was originally planning to make legs out of styrofoam and cover them with sugarpaste, etc etc, but time got away from me, and that never quite happened.  Nevertheless (and despite the fact that yes, I am aware his panelling is not absolutely 100% accurate), I am very happy with this little guy.  And with half of him made of Nutella mud cake, and the other half Margarita madeira cake, he was Most Definitely the droid we were looking for...

Oh yes, and there were cookies...

The goodies:

 

The baddies:

 

 Aww, isn't that sweet?  A family portrait...

I should say a quick thank you here to the Completely Amazing Callye of The Sweet Adventures of Sugarbelle, as my Yoda, Darth Vader and Millenium Falcon cookies are direct copies of hers.  The other designs I figured out myself from photos of the various characters/Death Stars/light sabers.

In case you were wondering, The Muffin helped a little with these - she did Leia's and Han's hair, and also some of the stars.  And the other birthday girl helped out too - she filled in Darth Maul's face with red, and also did the red sections on Boba Fett - her first time with a piping bag!  We gave her a cake cookbook for her birthday after that (can you tell the children in our family are being steadily dragged into my baking obsession?  I Shall Assimilate Them All, mwah ha haaah!  Ahem.) 

I wanted to incorporate some of the more iconic characters from the new(er) movies as well as the originals, as I (as the "old") was dressing as Leia, while the Other Birthday Girl (as the "new") was coming as Padme.  So Amidala and Darth Maul were the obvious choices.  Amidala was a bit of a challenge...

It was very hard to avoid her resembling a Balinese dancer, I'm afraid, but in context at least she was easily recognisable.  Here's the whole gang:

I must say, the most amusing part of sharing this party with my not-so-little-anymore cousin was that she agreed to this party theme Having Never Seen Star Wars.  I am not kidding - I bet most fifteen year old girls are not such good sports!   So during the week before the party, we had her over for a sleepover, so she could stay up until half-past one in the morning watch Episodes Four and One (in that order).  Then she asked for all the spoilers, so in light of the impending party, we gave her a rundown.  She already knew about who Darth Vader is, but was completely (and hilariously) horrified to find out the true identity of Princess Leia...

"WHAT?  NO!  But... but... No, that's just wrong!  But she and Luke make SUCH a cute couple!!"
Too funny.  :o)

And in case you're wondering where I got my Leia costume, I made it!  Who wants to see?

Snow White Princess Cake

I know, I know, I'm sorry.  Worst blogger ever.  Honestly though, I have been pretty busy with other things lately, and even considered giving up the blog altogether.

Instead, I have decided I am going to try very hard to post something more often - even if it's just a picture of the latest thing I've been baking (or sewing!).  If less wordy = less time consuming, then that's the way those posts will be.  At the end of the day, you'd probably rather just see pictures of cake than listen to me ramble anyway, right?  :o)

So anyway, this is a cake I made for a little girl's 6th birthday recently(ish).  She wanted a Dolly Varden style Snow White cake.  I've never done a Dolly Varden cake before, so it was quite interesting and fun for me to try it out.  Here's what I ended up with:

Snow is wearing her classic outfit, all made from sugarpaste (ie rolled fondant icing), including the bodice and sleeves, which I stuck directly onto the doll.  The only things that aren't edible are the doll itself, her hair, and her crown (this is a plastic one that came with the doll, so I figured why make work for myself when the plastic one is just as cute anyway - plus the birthday girl can keep it for her other dolls afterward).  You can't really see it very well in the photo, but the little apple next to Snow was completely covered in red cake decorating glitter - it was super sparkly and looked pretty cool, if I do say so myself!  :o)

The cake underneath the skirt was chocolate Madeira cake, and I baked it in two sections - one in a pudding basin (for the shape), and the other in a regular round eight-inch cake tin.  I then stacked the pudding basin one on top of the round one and trimmed them to become one cohesive skirt shape.  This gave the cake a good amount of height.  If I had just used the pudding basin alone, she would have been a very short and stumpy princess!  There is of course such a thing as a proper Dolly Varden cake tin, but I don't have one, and I've also heard that they're quite difficult to work with.  Anyway, I found this method worked just fine.

Not sure if the method I chose for covering the skirt was the best one, as it was a lot harder than I had expected.  But I think the end result was pretty good for my first try - and the birthday girl and her mum were Thrilled, which is the important thing!

Rainbow Cookies

Here are the cookies I made for The Muffin's birthday party:

Most of these were very simple.  The idea behind the shapes comes, once again, from the Rainbow Magic series of fairy books.  Each fairy has her own colour of fairy dust, which changes into a shape in midair.  Ruby the Red Fairy's dust turns into little red flowers, Amber's turns to orange bubbles, Saffron's to yellow butterflies, Fern's to green leaves, Sky's to blue stars, Inky's to indigo ink drops, and Heather's to violet blossoms.  So most of the cookies are minis, in these shapes and colours.   I wanted to keep them quite simple so that they would be more like, for example, a leaf shape rather than an actual leaf.

The rainbow cookies were made by using a large circular cutter, cutting the circle in half, and adding tiny cloud shapes... like this:

The rainbow stripes were piped on one colour at a time and given time to dry before the next colour was added.  Finally, I piped the clouds on using stiff white icing, to give a nice puffy-textured look to the clouds.  The clouds were also sprinkled with lots of white edible glitter.  I was really pleased with how these turned out, EXCEPT that as you may be able to see, I had huge cratering problems on the coloured stripes of the rainbows.  Oh well, it happens.  And none of the six year olds seemed to mind!  ;o)

Hope you're having a great week - I have been busy with some new Lollybright projects this week, including some very cute hair accessories, so I might have to show you some of those soon!

Rainbow Magic Fairy Cake!

Phew, it's been busy around here!  Life is settling back to normal now though, with The Muffin back at school (she has just started Grade One - goodness my baby is growing up!)

The Muffin's latest obsession has, for a while now, been the Rainbow Magic fairy books, by Daisy Meadows.  For her birthday, she obviously wanted a Rainbow Magic fairy party.  I had plans to make a plain round cake and decorate it, but The Muffin had other ideas.  "Mummy can I have a Pot At The End Of The Rainbow?  With the fairies all in it?"  I warned her there would be a fair bit of black involved, which she was (somewhat surprisingly) fine with, and then we compromised on her four favourite fairies, rather than all seven.  In the long run, this was her cake:

I made a collage so you don't have to scroll through so many photos!  You're welcome.  :o)

The cake itself was white chocolate Madeira cake layered with raspberry Swiss Meringue Buttercream (The Muffin's choice).  All the decorations were made from sugarpaste with a bit of CMC mixed in.  The fairies were made naked, and then their clothing and hair was painted on with royal icing.

Amber would have looked better suspended on white florists' wire rather than green, I think, but I didn't have any strong enough.  It was less noticeable at the party, as it wasn't against the white background!

I was very pleased with my Bertram The Frog:

But in the end, I actually think this was my favourite bit of the whole cake:

 I had racked my brains trying to think how I was going to do the inside of the Pot At The End Of The Rainbow.  Obviously it couldn't be hollow (with furniture in it), because then there would be no cake in it.  But I didn't want to just do it black, either.  This was quite a black cake for a six year old anyway, I thought!  And then suddenly I had a great idea:  what would you see if you looked into a pot full of Rainbow Fairies?  Why, rainbow colours of course!  And lots and lots of sparkles, obviously (which once again Do Not show up in photographs).  I thought it was quite effective, The Muffin was thrilled - and it was Super Easy.  Win-win!

We also had cookies - I'll show you those tomorrow!

Ballerina Alice Cookies

So I was a wee bit busy before Christmas, and never quite got around to posting these...

Last year was The Muffin's first year of ballet classes, and for the end of year concert, all the little ballerinas in her class played the part of the "little Alices" in Wonderland (this was part of a larger "Ballet Wonderland" item which spanned several classes and pieces of music - The Muffin's class did the part where Alice has shrunk after drinking from the little bottle).  It was very cute, and we were so proud of The Muffin for going out on that big stage and trying her very best!  She actually did a great job too! (because I am not biased At All).

So anyway, for the dance school's end-of-year party, I baked and decorated these cookies.

They were gone within about five seconds.

So it was a good thing that before the party, the White Rabbit and I had a little picnic first...

We also packaged a few up as a gift for The Muffin's ballet teacher - I thought she was going to cry!  The little ballerina cookies were made to look a bit like the costumes the little girls wore in the concert.  They were also sparkly, which Never Shows Up In Photos.  This is Very Annoying.

I really enjoyed making these cookies;  they were so cute, and (with the exception of the ballerina) they were super easy to make.  Most of the icing was 20-second icing, and all the black details were simply drawn on afterward with a food marker.

Want more Alice goodies?  You could check out my cupcakes from the 2011 Royal Show... Or just type "Alice" into the search field over on the right - we love Wonderland around here!

Merry Christmas... (& Sweets for Santa!)

Here in Australia, it gets pretty hot at Christmas time.  Tomorrow is forecast to be 39 degrees Celsius.

So when it fell to me this year to make the dessert for Christmas lunch, I thought something made of icecream would be very welcome in the middle of the day!

Lately I've been a bit obsessed with gingerbread (oh yes, there has been a lot of baking going on.  Just not much blogging).  So I decided it would be rather nice to make a layered molded dessert of gingerbread and vanilla icecreams - mmm....  Ooh, and I could enter it into the latest Sweet Adventures Blog Hop!

Didn't it turn out pretty?  I was panicking a bit about getting it out of the mold before Christmas Day, but it seems to have gone back into the freezer with no problems...

If you're not thinking about licking that picture, with its chewy-crunchy gingerbread base, and deliciously frosty layers of vanilla and gingerbread creaminess, you totally should be.  Trust me.  But wait - it gets cuter.  This is what it's going to look like when it hits the table tomorrow:

Teeny gingerbread men and hearts, with a royal-iced gingerbread star, complete this treat!

So here's the recipe - and it might be too late to make it for Christmas Day, but you could definitely make either of these icecreams on their own just to eat from a bowl - the vanilla is really good, but I am very proud of the gingerbread - maybe I'm biased in favour of anything gingerbready right now, but personally I think it's sensational...

Gingerbread Icecream Tree

Vanilla Icecream
Ingredients
400mL cream
100mL whole milk
1 vanilla bean
5 egg yolks
125g caster sugar

Modus Operandi
Place cream, milk and vanilla bean in a medium sized saucepan, and heat slowly just until boiling point, then remove from heat immediately.  Meanwhile, whisk egg yolks and sugar in a bowl until pale and creamy.  Gradually add the cream mixture to the egg mixture, and continue to whisk until combined.  Transfer the mixture to a clean saucepan, and cook over low heat, stirring all the time, for around 15-20 minutes, until it coats the back of a spoon.  Do not allow to boil!  Refrigerate the mixture until cold (preferably overnight), before churning in an icecream maker.
Pour churned icecream into your chosed mold, and freeze.

Gingerbread
Ingredients
115g butter
1/2 cup caster sugar
1/2 cup molasses
1 egg yolk
300g sifted plain flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
2 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp grated nutmeg

MO
Cream the butter and sugar just until smooth.  Stir in the molasses and egg yolk.
Combine the dry ingredients and stir into the molasses mixture until smooth.  The mixture will be very soft and sticky - that's okay.  Wrap it in plastic, and chill for at least one hour.
Meanwhile, take a piece of baking paper and draw around the shape of the mold you have used for your icecream.  Cut the shape out, and put it aside.
Preheat the oven to 175C (350F).  On a lightly floured surface, roll the dough out to about 8mm thickness.  Using your baking paper template, cut the shape you will need for your base out of your gingerbread dough (in my case, a large Christmas tree).  Transfer the shaped gingerbread onto a lined baking tray (note:  you will make your life much easier if you keep the paper shape on the gingerbread tree shape until you have transferred it to the tray.  It will inevitably warp a little in the process, and having the paper template still there means you can smooth it back into shape before baking).  Remove the template and keep it for later.
Bake the large gingerbread in the oven until firm, and the edges are golden brown (the actual time will vary depending on the size and shape of your mold.  Mine took around 15 minutes).
Bake your small cookies for around 8-10 minutes.  Cool on trays.

When it is completely cool, move your large gingerbread shape to a board, and trim it back to the desired shape using your paper template.  Theoretically I imagine this would be easier while the gingerbread was still warm, but I wasn't game enough to move it at that stage.  Please yourself.  :o)

Gingerbread Icecream
Ingredients
600mL cream
Some of your Gingerbread cookies - I used about 90g of them (although I had some left over from my last batch, so depending on the size of your mold's base, you might need to make two batches of gingerbread if you want to decorate with them too.  Not sure... sorry.  But hey, who minds extra gingerbread around the house, am I right?)
6 egg yolks
150g light brown sugar
2 Tbsp molasses
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp grated nutmeg

MO
Exactly the same as for the vanilla icecream, but add your gingerbread cookies to your cream mixture right at the beginning.  When you remove it from the heat, strain it through a sieve.  The cookies will have turned to mush - stir it a bit to help the liquid through the sieve, but don't force it all through.  Most of the cookie mush will go through the sieve easily - any that doesn't, discard.
Add the spices and molasses to the egg/sugar mixture just before adding the cream mixture.
When the icecream is churned, pour it into the mold on top of the vanilla, and freeze.

To construct:
Take your icecream out of the freezer, and whilst it is still in the mold, press the gingerbread base firmly onto it.  Return to the freezer until it is time to serve.

At serving time, flip the icecream tree out onto your desired serving plate (it's a good idea to freeze that, too, to stop the icecream from starting to melt quite so quickly!)  Decorate as desired.


Wow, that was kind of long.  But trust me, it's totally worth it!  And after all, we all deserve to be a bit indulgent at Christmas, right?

I really hope that you and yours have a wonderful, fun, peaceful holiday season - and do check out the other Sweets For Santa at the blog hop below - this month it's being hosted by Christina over at The Hungry Australian - she did an icecream dessert too, and it looks amazing!

Bad Blogger. Bad, Bad Blogger.

Wow...  So it's been a while, huh?  I mean, I know my blogging "schedule" is fairly erratic at the best of times, but I can't believe I haven't posted anything here since Hallowe'en!

So I'm not going to bore you with seven weeks' worth of Muffin Tin Mondays.  We've totally been doing them, but I just seem to have been incredibly busy lately, what with sewing, prepping for The Muffin's first ever ballet concert, baking for her end-of-school parties.  And at the end of any given day, when it's been a choice of:  a) blog latest Muffin Tin and/or cookie;  b) relax with husband in front of the TV;  or c) fold washing / sew something in front of the TV...  well, let's just say that blogging never managed to win that fight.

Wait a minute... did I say "sew something"?  Why, yes.  Yes I did.  Truth is, I've been spending a fair bit of my free time on my new(ish) hobby, which is sewing - not clothes, but toys, ornaments, and cute things.  And guess what - I've even opened an Etsy shop!  And people who are not my relatives have bought things from me!  You can probably guess I'm pretty excited about that.  If you're interested in checking out my Etsy shop, it's here:  Lollybright Toys!  I'd really love it if you'd stop by and tell me what you think...

Now, I do have a couple of Muffin Tins to show you - just this week and last week's.  We decided to do a "Twelve Days of Christmas" theme.  We split the twelve days over two weeks, and it was such fun!

So here goes:  On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me...

 

Bottom Row (right to left):  Twelve Drummers Drumming (drumsticks made from cherry bocconcini impaled on pretzel sticks);  Eleven Pipers Piping (strips of hash brown, with music note picks);  Ten Lords Leaping (or apple frogs, actually).

Top Row (right to left):  Nine Ladies Dancing (ballerina fairy bread);  Eight Maids a-Milking (milk);  Seven Swans a-Swimming (swan carved out of a pfeffernusse, with pale blue M&M water).

 

Bottom Row (right to left):  Six Geese a-Laying (hard-boiled egg);  Five Gold Rings (made of cheese);  Four Calling Birds (chopped up mango with music note picks).

Top Row (right to left):  Three French Hens (cut out of carrot, with cheese wings & beaks, black sesame eyes and heart-sprinkle combs);  Two Turtle Doves (dove shaped pikelets with butter);  and a Partridge in a Pear Tree (dried pear)!

She ate the lot out of the second tin (days 7-12), and all but one gold ring and one French Hen out of the first tin (days 1-6).  She had a huge amount of fun with this - the way she ate it was hilarious.  She sang the song, and ate a bit of each thing with Every Single Line.  She even managed to ration each thing out so that she had a little of each left for the last line of the song.  The fact that this meant she was eating sweet then savoury then sweet then savoury the whole time did not faze her at all.  Too funny.

If you want to check out some more Muffin Tin Goodness, click on over to the Muffin Tin Mom's blog - she's on a break right now, but people can still link up.

I promise I'll be back here again before Christmas, to share some yummy treats - 'tis the season to be on a Massive Sugar High, after all!  Until then, I hope you and your families are safe and well, and enjoying the festive season.