Puppies, Balloons, Buzz, Triathlon, Bieber... Oh My!

I've been remiss in posting my recent cupcake creations to the blog!

Early October I made a rather large puppy cake for 6 year old Brian's birthday... Because they were having about 8o at the party, I augmented the design with balloons, which were also featured on his invitation.

I left the balloon cupcakes separate (from each other, and not frosted as one mass) because I wanted to use sugars for some of the colors.... there were red balloons in the picture, and I avoid red frosting at all costs! It just tastes terrible (even with "tasteless"
color gels) and it stains mouths and most anything it touches!

About 2 weeks after the puppy, Michele had me make cakes for her niece and nephew again (last year they had the Nemo/Arial cake). I was most concerned about Buzz Lightyear, but amazingly, it wasn't as much of a challenge as I expected (once I got the skin color set... for a while it looked like Buzz had visited a spray tanning booth!). I used jelly for his head cap (which is purple.. .another tough color to make without terrible taste and staining)... but the jelly worked great! I'm guessing it tasted pretty good too. The puppy was similar to the one I made for Bryan, so I was able to relax about execution, and enjoy the process a little more.

At the end of October, Rowan turned 3! (Rowan was the recipient of the Frankenstein cake last year).

This year he had a Justin Bieber theme, so his mom requested a microphone. How cool is this? Oh, and if you don't know, Bieber is really into purple, so she also requested a purple base for the cake . I had a lot of fun with this cake and was very happy with the result. For the microphone "head" I pressed the cupcakes into pulverized chocolate wafers to give it that spongey microphone feel. As usual, Helpful Husband provided his consultation to make the cake a greater success.

This month I was asked to make a cake for the surprise party of a woman who spends the majority of her waking moments challenging the limits of her physical being. If cupcake cakes were 3D I so would have done 2 halves of a mountain ... one representing ski season, the other hiking. But I settled for a triathlon theme, as Audra is a triathlete as well! I used brown sugar to represent dirt for the running portion of the cake and pulverized chocolate wafers for the tire/spokes/cycle portion. For the swim/water portion, again wanting to avoid BAD frosting, I used blue dusting sugar ... in a moment of brilliance, Husband thought to use his creme brulee blow torch to melt the sugar into a blue sea!

Next up - Pikachu! (Coming next week.)

{In other news, plans to update the kitchen are firming up, so you won't have to see my cakes against the current finishes for much longer! I CAN'T WAIT!}