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?

2012 Royal Show Entries

Once again, The Muffin and I both entered some of our baking efforts into The Perth Royal Show this year.  Here's what we entered...

Cinderella Cupcakes:  I entered these into the "Decorated Patty Cakes"  (ie cupcakes) section - and I won! 

The cupcakes themselves were my usual vanilla recipe (ie Billy Reece's Vanilla Vanilla recipe), frosted with my own vanilla buttercream.  The decorations are almost all sugarpaste (with a little CMC added).  There's a little royal icing to stick everything on, and also a tiny bit of piping on the "glass slipper" - oh, and the wheels of the carriage were lovely piped swirls of royal icing, painted with silver lustre.  But I took these photos after the Royal Show, and sadly the wheels were smashed to tiny pieces by the time I got them home!  So you'll just have to imagine them.

I was quite pleased with my little pumpkin - and it was very easy to do, too - I think with a different colour icing for the base, it would make a lovely Hallowe'en cupcake, too!

And here's a closeup of Cinders herself - she was the most time-consuming to make (unsurprisingly perhaps, although honestly I was expecting to have a lot more grief than I did with the glass slipper, having never made an icing shoe before.  It was easier than I thought it would be).  Cinderella's head and torso (with arms attached) were skewered with a piece of uncooked linguine (I thought spaghetti would not be strong enough to hold this, as it was quite a heavy decoration for a cupcake.  The linguine was a bit thicker and stronger), and left to dry overnight.  Then when it came time to decorate the cupcake, I simply draped a biggish circle of blue sugarpaste over the cupcake for the skirt, added the poofy bits of the skirt on in a slightly lighter blue (please feel free to admire my superior knowledge of dressmaking terms), and added Cinders to the top, pushing the linguine down into the cupcake to support her.

It was a bit of a rush job getting these cupcakes done this year - I just couldn't get inspired, so I ended up leaving it until the day before the delivery day to start making the decorations!  Luckily everything dried sufficiently, and I was happy with them in the end.

Bring on the cookies!  My cookies I was very happy with - no dramas here, I had a clear vision of how I wanted them to turn out, and they did...

Some of you may recognise the Dragon Claw Cookie (top right), and you'd be right - I originally made this cookie design to enter LilaLoa's Creative Cookie Competition way back in March.  It didn't win then, but guess what?  My cookies DID win at the Show!  Woo hoo!

I also got Second Prize in the "Cake Using Honey" class, but I didn't take a photo of that, because it was pretty boring looking (no icing allowed, etc).  It's a really yummy cake though, and it was based on my Sunny Honey Cupcakes recipe.  If you haven't tried lavender and honey cupcakes yet, then you should totally go and make these immediately - they are really yummy!

As pleased as I am about my Show wins, funnily enough the prizes I was most excited about were two little "Highly Commended" certificates - and they weren't even mine.  Because The Muffin entered two classes this year, and she got Highly Commended for both!  Happy Mummy Dance!  I was SO happy she got this bit of recognition, because she works so hard on her Show cookies, and she's always been so good about saying "I don't mind if I don't win, Mummy - it's fun just entering".  But you know that deep down in her little five-year-old heart, she'd love to win something.

Here are her Decorated Cookies:

I didn't help her at all with these, she did the lot herself, including making the little sugarpaste heart and flower (I did help bake the cookies obviously, but the kids' cookies are not judged on taste, only on appearance - they are even allowed to use store-bought cookies - so the baking part doesn't count in this class).

2012 is Year Of The Farmer, so there were special "Scarecrow" classes this year in every category.  I didn't enter any of these, but The Muffin did enter the kids' special class, which was "Scarecrow Biscuit".  What they had to do was use commercial cookies and lollies to make a picture of a scarecrow, glued down with icing onto a paper plate.  Here is The Muffin's entry:

Congratulations, Muffin!  Your Daddy and I are both so proud of you!

Let The Games Begin!

Over the last couple of weeks, The Muffin has been incredibly excited about the approach of the Olympic Games.  She noticed all the products packaged in green and gold at the supermarket a few weeks ago, and wanted to know what all that was about.  So I explained to her what the Olympics were, and mentioned they were coming up soon, and expected that to be the end of it.

But I had not reckoned on Pre-Primary.  Over the past week, her class has been learning about the Olympics, and I swear she's now teaching me stuff.  It's fantastic;  they've made Olympic torches, gold medals, pictures of the Olympic rings, and more!  So now she is SUPER excited, has announced that next Monday we will be having an Olympic-themed muffin tin, and couldn't wait to see the Opening Ceremony.

So I thought I'd whip up a simple little treat for us to eat while we watched.  Now I know this isn't an original idea, but it is very simple, and lots of fun - The Muffin loved it.  She claimed the Silver.

How to make Oreo Olympic Medals

1.  Grab a packet of Gold Oreo cookies (in Australia I have only found these at Coles;  Woolworths didn't have them)

2.  Brush each cookie with lustre dust in either gold, silver, or bronze.

3.  Cut some fruit leather straps into thin strips and arrange on a plate.

That's it!

This picture shows the shine a little better:

So what did you think of London's Opening Ceremony?  (my personal favourite bits were Rowan Atkinson playing the piano during "Chariots of Fire" - hilarious - and also the very different lighting of the flame). 
And are your kids excited about the Olympics?

Mini-Beast Cookies

This term at pre-primary, The Muffin's class has been studying "mini-beasts" (ie. all the little insects, spiders, snails, worms, etc that live in the garden).  To celebrate the end of term, they had a little party.  Each child dressed as their favourite mini-beast, and brought a plate of food to share.  The Muffin and I decided to make mini-beast cookies!

The Muffin actually helped a lot with these;  she did most of the caterpillars herself, plus the purple bits on the snails, and the pink bits on the butterflies (she suggested "let's use the wet-on-wet technique for these spots, Mummy!"  Hilarious.  She's five.)

We had lots of fun doing these together, and I hear the class had lots of fun eating them!

Snow White Cookies

The Muffin and I decided to decorate some cookies just for fun on the school holidays. I let The Muffin choose the cutters she wanted (girly girly ones of course), and then she had a good idea: "Mummy let's each choose a Princess and do that theme of cookies!" She (predictably) chose Cinderella, but I'd been looking for an excuse to try out my new mini apple cutter, so I chose Snow White.

As it was mainly an activity for The Muffin to enjoy, I let her have most of the control over shapes etc, which meant I only got two: a couple of dresses, and a whole lot of apples! Here's what I came up with:

Poisoned apple, anyone?

No, no, Snow White - don't eat it...!

Oh... too late.

Interestingly, these cookies were all decorated exclusively with 20-second icing (normally I'm an outline-and-flood girl). I loved the way the 20-second icing worked for the sleeves on the Snow White dress - made them nice and puffy. Also the apples. I think 20-second icing is definitely the go for these little mini cookies, and it just goes to show that it can be used to flood and add detail to a larger cookie if you are feeling lazy in a hurry (the red detailing on the front of the bodice was still 20-second icing - I just used a #1 tip after the main part of the dress had more or less dried). The slashes on the sleeves were done using the wet-on-wet technique.

And if you're wondering, here are the cookies The Muffin decorated:

You can't see it, but her dress was all sparkly - you know, from the Fairy Godmother's magic.

It was a fun day!

Easter Fun

Okay, so I know Easter is all over and done (apart from the enormous mountain of chocolate currently residing in our cupboard. Wow.), but before we kiss it goodbye entirely, I thought I'd share a few things we did to celebrate on Sunday...

Coloured Eggs

Sure, everybody colours eggs for Easter, right? But we do it a little differently...

We used to do it the normal way (ie boil eggs, then soak in food colouring to colour the shells), but we found that little hairline cracks in the shell would usually cause skanky-looking coloured bits on the egg itself inside, and sometimes there was actual coloured water hiding in there as a nasty surprise for the person who cracked it open (because we colour our eggs to eat, not just to look at). When, a few years ago, my friend's small son ended up with indigo-coloured water running down his arms, I thought to myself, There Has To Be A Better Way.

So then it occurred to me that it's really the shell causing the problem - and Who Needs The Shell, Anyway? So now when we dye eggs, we hard-boil them, shell them, and then dye them. And after just a minute or two (way quicker than dyeing eggs with shells), they look like this:

Aren't they pretty?

And the best part is, it means you don't have to feed people just a whole boiled egg (which is, let's face it, kinda boring) - instead, you can halve them, scoop the yolks out and make a yummy filling to pipe back in...

And they're still pretty!

Sweeties

We had cookies (which I've already posted separately, but here they are on the platter):

Quick & easy chicky cupcakes (with Starburst Chew beaks, which incidentally are So Yummy! - I hadn't had them before):

And The Muffin and I also made some of these M&M birds (this fantastic idea is from Callye at The Sweet Adventures of Sugarbelle - she did them with sugar almonds as well - so cute, and so very easy!)


The Muffin's Dinner

After all the festivities, none of us wanted a proper dinner, but I wanted The Muffin to eat something halfway decent too, so when she asked for "a cute chicken themed Easter bento", I thought sure, why not?

She had a cheese & Vegemite sandwich cut into three pieces: an Egg With Legs, and two mini chicks. The chicks have black sesame seed eyes, and one of them is just hatching out of a chocolate egg (against my better judgement. But it was out of The Muffin's present stash, so she would have eaten it eventually anyway, and it was Easter, after all). The Egg With Legs has the cheese legs painted with a tiny bit of orange food colour, and icing eyes. There are also spinach leaves, cashews, and grapes.
I'm linking this meal to Bento Of The Week over at Bento Blog Network.

Hope everyone's Easter was as fun as ours - how did you spend yours?

Surprise! (It's A Cookie)

Way, way back in the dark ages, before there was Abby Cadabby, or Baby Bear - hey, even before there was Elmo (gasp!), there was a series of books called "The Sesame Street Library". Fifteen volumes of Sesame Street awesomeness, and I had them all. If you can still get hold of these, I highly recommend picking a set up for your child. Or, you know, your inner child.

One of the features of each volume (or most of them) was a recipe - sometimes it was something different, like Big Bird's Banana Bread, but usually it was a cookie recipe presented by Cookie Monster. The first volume contained a basic cookie dough recipe (see below), and the other volumes used this dough in various ways. I would pore over these recipes in Rapturous Contemplation of All The Possibilities.

The weird thing is, despite the huge amount of baking I did with my mother as a child, I do not remember ever having made any of those cookies!

Anyway, the other cool thing about those books is, I Still Have Them. Yep, the very same ones my mother bought for me in the late seventies. Actually, they belong to The Muffin now. And we decided we would make some of those cookies. After some perusal, we were most taken with the idea of the Surprise Cookies.

It's actually a very cool idea. You start with a basic cookie dough. Obviously Cookie Monster uses his very own recipe, and so did we. However I see no reason why you couldn't use your favourite sugar cookie dough, as long as it's fairly stable. Cookie Monster's dough is a bit tougher than my usual sugar cookie recipe, and I think this probably helps to keep these cookies in one piece once they are baked. Anyway, once you have your dough of choice, roll it out thinly and cut it into circles. Then add some kind of filling to one circle...

... and add another circle on top. Pinch around the edges (note my five-year-old hand model)....


... and bake! These are very easy, and a great fun cooking activity to do with kids. The trick is to do lots of different fillings, and give them no identifying marks...


So the fun part is, when you pick up a cookie, you don't know what it contains...

The peanut butter choc chip were my favourites...


This filling was lucky I didn't eat it before I put it in the cookies...

Mmm...

Another surprise favourite was the tinned apple filling. Everyone who tried these listed it in their top two. Which brings me to the only problem with these cookies...

When it's this much fun finding out what's inside, noone can stop at one!


Cookie Monster's Cookie Dough
(thanks to Sesame Street & The Childrens Television Workshop)

Ingredients (exactly as listed in the book)
3/4 cup butter
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
2 1/2 cups plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt

Modus Operandi (same as in the book, but abbreviated somewhat.)
Combine butter and sugar in a mixing bowl (the recipe says to use a fork. I used my mixer). Add eggs and vanilla and mix to combine. Add dry ingredients and mix to form a dough. Refrigerate for at least an hour before rolling out.