Game of Thrones cookies

I'm baaaaaack!

Yes, life got in the way there for a while!  But after quite a long break at my little blog, I've decided I miss it, so I hope there are still one or two of you out there who haven't forgotten me!

So, on to important business:  is everyone excited about the return of Game of Thrones?  I am!  And it got me thinking about Husband's birthday party last year, which he requested a Game of Thrones theme.  It was great fun, and a good time was had by all (even the people who'd never seen or read GoT, thankfully!)  We didn't make them dress up (although we did, of course!), but I did theme all the foods etc, and luckily people really got into it, and enjoyed the chance to - quite literally - share meat and mead with us!

Honestly?  I'm not going to go into the savouries in detail - you'll do much better just heading over to The Inn At The Crossroads for that - suffice to say that the Honeyed Chicken is delish!  I also made Saladhor Sahn's meatballs and eggplant dip, as well as a couple of salads (one from The Inn, one I just cobbled together based on the description in the book).  They were all good.  Sansa's lemon cakes also made an appearance.

But you're here to see cookies, right?  Well, here they are:

Houses Stark, Tully, Targaryen, Frey, Lannister and Martell, respectively.  Various versions of each House's sigil may be found via Google if you're interested in recreating these - pick the ones you like best!

These cookies were made using royal icing transfer method - that is, I piped the sigil designs onto baking paper, allowed them to dry completely, added any edible marker details, and finally lifted them oh-so-carefully onto dry royal-icing-covered cookies.  The watery parts of the Tully and Frey designs were done directly onto the cookies;  just the castles and fish were transferred.  I found this method of decorating to be excellent for these cookies - not only did it make the designs "pop" (as the sigils stood out slightly from the cookie's surface), but it also allowed for a lot more errors while piping these very intricate designs.  I was particularly terrified of moving the Targaryen dragon, and I did break a couple, but in fact the Stark direwolf proved to be more of a problem with its spiky fur and tiny little teeth - I lost more of those than anything else, despite them looking much more sturdy than the dragons!  Go figure.

For those of you who like to have a point of reference, here are a couple of the designs shown on a set of coasters I bought for the party:-

The coasters can be found (among other places) at ThinkGeek.

Anyway, must run for now, but I hope you like these cookies, and that they put you in the mood for this week's instalment!  (now if only George RR Martin would finish the last book....)

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?

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!

Mexican Party Cake

 This is a cake I made for my friend's Mexican-themed 40th birthday party a few weeks ago:

 Here's a closeup of the figure on top:

 My friend is known for her big sunnies, bright red lippie, curly hair and obsession with Doctor Who...

Inside, the bottom layer was chocolate mud cake, and the top layer was Margarita Madeira cake.  The Margarita Madeira was SO good - I will definitely be making it again!  I used my regular Madeira cake recipe, and added lime zest and a little lime juice to the batter, then layered it with Tequila lime syrup and Cointreau-laced French buttercream.  Yum....

Hope you're all having a good week - there'll be lots more sugar around here very soon, as I am currently in the process of making my goodies for the Royal Show - wish me luck!

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?

Once Upon A Time...

...there was a beautiful, clever, funny little princess. Her mummy called her The Muffin, even though that wasn't really her name ('cause that would be weird).

And this year, she turned five.

For her first ever "friends" (or kids') party, she wanted a Princess Party. She chose this theme approximately 50 weeks ago, after having spotted the photo on the box of my Wilton's Romantic Castle Kit. Yes folks, she tailored her entire party theme around her choice of cake, and has been planning it all year. This Is So My Child.

In fairness, she is also a big Cinderella fan, so I'm sure that helped her decision somewhat.

We decided on purple, pink, white and silver as the colour palette (unoriginal, but Oh So Princessy)...


There were savoury foods, obviously, but really who knows (or cares) what they were? Let's be honest: it's all about the sugar.

I was pleased with how the cookies turned out, even though I didn't notice until JUST NOW that I failed to add the white outline to one of my shield/coat-of-arms cookies! But as far as I'm aware, neither did anyone else, so I am choosing to believe that.

There were also cupcakes, simply frosted with raspberry buttercream, and each topped with either a silvery-purple sugarpaste crown, three sugarpaste blossoms, or a Wilton's princess cakepop pick (they work well on cupcakes!).

I almost always make fruit skewers for parties, as they provide a healthy option whilst generally still being hugely popular. This time I wanted them to be a little prettier than usual, and I must thank my mother for stepping in and cutting all the little flowers and things out (even though the whole time she was saying "This is taking For Ever", and "I still don't really get what these are supposed to be"). In the end I think they looked great! (Thanks Mum!)

We had really pretty Paper Eskimo "Princess Girl" balloons, (but not the spotty ones, because I used those for the Spotty Party last year) and I even went all Martha Stewart and made these big tissue paper pompom thingies:


And can I just say: So Much Easier than I thought they were going to be! Instructions at yes, you guessed it, Martha Stewart. I see a lot more tissue paper pompom thingies in my future...

And oh yeah, here is the cake:

This was made with the Wilton Romantic Castle Kit, so there is significant plastic. Also as you can see, the design is fairly simple. I had originally planned to pipe little green leaves around the flowers, and a leafy border around the bottom of the whole castle, but I just ran out of time. Funnily enough though, in some ways I think I'm quite happy I didn't add anything else - I think it has a kind of pale purity that might have been lost by the addition of another colour. (Yes, that is my story and I am sticking to it). Plus my little princess and her friends all LOVED it.

The little flowers were cut from sugarpaste with a blossom cutter, each with a tiny silver cachou in the centre. The little crown over the doorway is a candle. All the other pink and purple bits are royal icing sprinkled with sanding sugar.

On arrival, the kids all decorated their own crowns (the templates for which I found here).

This is The Muffin's finished result:

The little princesses (and one very handsome prince!) played musical cushions, pass-the-parcel, and Find Cinderella's Lost Slipper. When the time came to leave, they all took home a loot bag filled with lollies, Disney Princess lip gloss, a castle hair clip, princess stickers, and a pretty eraser (and no, I didn't give the boy lip gloss! He got a toy horse, eraser, and knight-and-dragon stickers instead).

My little Muffin had the best time! I'm sure that in years to come, she'll be wanting parties at the newest coolest party place, or wanting to hire hundreds of dollars worth of party entertainer, but I love that for now she is just so happy to eat pretty cookies with her friends. Happy Birthday, sweetheart!

Over the Rainbows

Finally as promised, here are the photos of my beloved Muffin's fifth birthday party - the first one, that is!

(nb: Cake pop idea from Bubble & Sweet)

The Muffin had decided that she would like "a night party" with the family, just like the big girls (her older cousins) have. This is generally a simple get-together, where everyone brings some sort of finger food along to share for dinner. We decided on a Rainbow theme for this party, partly because it's a bright, happy and Super Easy theme to do, and partly because The Muffin and I had both fallen in love with Sweetapolita's Rainbow Doodle Cake post, and really wanted to try it out.

So I baked the cake, following Sweetapolita's recipe. The only change I made was that whilst I did fill the cake with lemon Swiss meringue buttercream, I thought it would be too soft for the outer frosting layer. It was 39 degrees Celsius on the day of the party, and SMBC is just too soft for Australian summers - I learned that the hard way! So I coated the cake in white chocolate ganache (Planet Cake style), before covering it with white fondant.

Then I let The Muffin loose with my food markers. She had a lovely time!

(please excuse the extremely attractive great cavernous hole left by one of the fattest birthday candles ever...)


When the cake was cut, it really did cause a sensation!


One thing to keep in mind if you decide to make this cake: whilst it is easy, it does take a really long time to bake (unless you have heaps of tins the same size). I only have two 8-inch cake tins, so I had to bake the cake in three batches. Not difficult, just a bit time consuming, that's all.

Another idea I'd been dying to try out was one I found over at Bubble and Sweet. Her little smiley cloud cake pops are so adorable! My version turned out a little messier (I stuck the rainbows on in a hurry while the party was actually on - I know, I am just So Organised) - but I was still really happy with the result! The Muffin helped me make the little rainbows out of fondant, too.


The Muffin and I also made some small rainbow-shaped cookies and iced them with white icing. Then when they were dry, we drew rainbows on them with the food markers! We were very pleased with these, and I couldn't believe it the day after the party when I realised: We Had Completely Forgotten To Serve The Cookies!!

So I had an idea: as The Muffin started Pre-Primary on her actual birthday, she was taking cupcakes in to school to celebrate with the class. A little change of plan re cupcake paper colours and decorations, et voila:

Rainbow Cupcakes!

Our table decorations were very simple: we simply had one helium balloon in each colour of the rainbow, each tied to a clear cellophane lolly bag with just a few lollies and a very simple novelty (it was a gesture - we don't do full-on goody bags for family parties). These we lined up along the back of the food table so that the balloons floated in a line next to each other in rainbow colour order. It looked surprisingly effective!

We had great fun with this party theme, and the best thing was how excited The Muffin was at being able to help with it all (and I think she did a great job, too!)

Of course, the following weekend (ie yesterday), she also had a Princess themed party with all her little friends - but that's another story...

Spotty Party!

So I'm finally getting around to posting some pics of The Muffin's birthday party (a few weeks after the event, but hey, who's counting?)

For my little girl's birthday this year, she did not want Princesses. Or Fairies. Or Mermaids. No. It was "Mummy, I would like a Spotty theme for my party". I have no idea where that came from, but there we are. It actually suited me just fine, as
a) "spotty" is fairly easy as themes go; b) I like spots too; c) I think the princess thing will work better once she's of school age and the majority of the guests are under the age of fifteen; and d) she was willing to hand over complete creative control of her cake, provided it included spots and purple. Score!

So this is what I made:-

Overall I was pretty happy with it in the end. It was actually kind of a nightmare to make, as the weather was not only hot, but really humid as well. And we all know how much sugarpaste looooves humidity... In the end I had to take the whole thing to a friend's house to decorate it (thank you thank you - it's so nice to have awesome neighbours!), as refrigerated airconditioning was the only way I could think of to dry it out (like seriously, it was Wet). That's the other good thing about spots - they can be strategically placed to cover the worst blemishes!

I decided on the caterpillar and ladybug as a way of adding a cute factor, and also to add another personalised element... For Christmas I got Miniscule on DVD (after some fairly obvious hints in that direction), and it never really occurred to me that The Muffin would like it too. But of course it's so cute, and funny as well, that she has fallen in love right along with me. So I picked out two of the spottier characters for her cake - the ever-hungry and oh-so-cute caterpillar...


... and the ultra-cheeky, naughty ladybug...



The Muffin and I also made spotty cake pops:-

And spotty party-themed cookies:-
I did the Present and Party Hat cookies, and The Muffin did the Spot cookies.
(and no, these are not really my best work. I actually forgot to take a pic of the whole platter - these were the leftovers! So annoying, I do that All The Time...)

The kids played Musical Bobs, fished for spotty foam fish in The Muffin's paddling pool (each fish had a specific prize associated with it), and had a Popcorn Race. The race was actually really good. We split the kids into two teams (evening out the ages/ability levels as much as possible) and gave each team a big container of air-popped popcorn and a large spoon. The kids took turns scooping up a spoonful of popcorn and carrying it to the other side of the yard, where each team had another (equal-sized) container. The first team to fill this second container with popcorn won. Not a new idea, I know, but it worked really well with the popcorn, especially as it was fairly windy that day! :o)

Anyway, a good time was had by all, and The Muffin took one look at her cake and said "Miniscule bugs! Can I eat the caterpillar?!!" And you can't ask for more than that...