Happy St. Patrick's Day and a Video Game Birthday Cake

Happy St. Patrick's Day and Happy Birthday to my little sister! I decided to make my sister a gaming cake this year and thought that a Minecraft Creeper border would be perfect for the holiday. The cake is a simple four layered yellow cake with chocolate ganache and vanilla buttercream. I made the decorations out of marshmallow fondant.

For the cake layers I used my favorite yellow cake recipe found here. I made two batches and threw in some rainbow sprinkles for one batch. For the ganache I used my all time favorite recipe. It's straight forward and easy to adjust if you need more or less ganache. Finally, for the buttercream I used this recipe. Since discovering this recipe it's the only one I use for buttercream. It works like a dream and as long as you carefully follow the instructions should turn out perfect every time. 

I topped the cake with Pokemon and Assassin's Creed. They're two of her favorite game series. 

I sculpted this to look like my sister dressed in Ash's clothes. 

I chose bulbasuar because he's green. I was being cheesy and tried to make everything green for St. Patrick's Day. And yes today is her real birthday. 

The Creeper face border. This was really fun and easy to make! 

The top of the cake. I ran out of room to fully spell out birthday >_< 

So that's all for this week. Hope you all have a safe and fun St. Patrick's day! Happy crafting and baking! ♥  

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IT'S ALIVE!!!!!!! A Big Apology and Recap of 2013 Projects

Please accept this picture of a sad cat as our most sincere apology. :( 

So you guys might have noticed that we've been on a horribly prolonged hiatus. While we'd like for you all to think that we've been out saving babies and kittens using our awesome crafting skills, the truth is we don't really have a valid excuse for our absence. I think what happened was that we missed a week of posting and then suddenly it was the new year. The good news is that we weren't completely unproductive; we actually have some stuff to share with you. We made a lot of fun stuff but some of it went undocumented because we just weren't in our usual blogger mindset. Again please forgive us. 

Yes Mushu, we have behaved most dishonorably.

To make up for everything this post is gonna be a quick recap of what we did take pictures of. Some of the projects will get their own blog post with tutorials. So on to the stuff. 

We made a giant gift basket full of goodies for our dear friend's baby shower. There's so much stuff crammed into the basket that it warrants it's very own post. So look out for it in the coming weeks. 

Ai has been on a bit of a shadow box kick lately. She's been making them to celebrate vacations and special occassions. Look at all the detail!!! ^_^ 

See this is how lazy we were to blog. We didn't even have the decency to share with you our awesome Threadcakes news. We somehow managed to snag a winning spot in our category! This year we're gunning for the number one spot, so look out for that later in the year. 

Ai got married recently and this was from her wedding shower! They're sugar butterflies that I will be teaching you how to make. The pink butterflies have brush embroidery details, which I've been obsessed with lately. I'll be doing a tutorial on that too. 

These were the thank you gifts we made for everyone who attended Ai's wedding shower. 

I have been so in love with Joe Pastry ever since I stumbled upon his blog. He is seriously the best. If you're looking for a pastry recipe, chances our he has a tutorial for it. I not only love that his recipes are so easy to follow, but also the fact that he explains the whys of the techniques used. If you haven't heard of him before go over to his blog now! 

  Most recent thing I did was make my birthday cake. Man am I getting seriously old. 

Also, I updated our most popular post since everyone has taken it upon themselves to sass us and let us know how dumb we are for failing and how we just weren't doing it right. Just a forewarning I got kind of sassy in the update, but seriously we knew what we were doing and I explain why the project is just a fail right from the start. Like I said, we went against our better judgment and wasted our time trying the project.

This is just some of the stuff we did during our absence. We promise to start posting weekly again. We have a lot of really great stuff planned for this year. We really are going to start making video tutorials. I know that October is a long way away, but we'll be posting about new costumes and cosplays. We might just be at Phoenix Comicon this year and cosplaying at a convention for the first time. We'll let you know if that's happening for sure. I can't really think of anything else at the moment, but we hope that too many of you haven't left us yet. As always happy crafting and baking! ♥  

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We Were in a Book! We need your help to win a contest!

About a year ago there was an open call going around asking for people to submit their costume and cosplay photos. We decided to take a chance and submit a few things and one of our costumes ended up in the book! The book is called 1000 Incredible Costume and Cosplay Ideas. It was put together by Joey Marsocci aka Dr. Grymm, Allison DeBlasio, and the Queen of Cosplay Yaya Han. If you're interested in seeing some really beautiful costumes or if you're into cosplay you should really check the book out!

 Here it is! The costume was in the section of original characters! My sister was so excited to see herself.

Here's the original picture. 

Before we sign off, we need your help! We entered a contest that is voting based and we need all of you to vote so we can win. You do have to have a facebook to vote. Please vote and help spread the word! Thanks! We love you all! ♥  Go here to vote for us!

That's all for this week folks! Hope you all are getting ready for the summer! Happy crafting and happy baking! ♥  

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Monkey Baby Shower Cake

We made a beautiful monkey themed baby shower cake this weekend for a friend! Now monkeys can be pretty tough to make look right but Ai did a phenomenal job! Her monkeys came out incredibly sweet and super adorable! 

The cake was a wonderfully light yellow cake made with this recipe! You must follow the recipe to a T and be sure to whip it for the whole 3 minutes. The cake just comes out absolutely fantastic and has a really nice crumb.

The filling was a light vanilla custard layered with fresh strawberries and blueberries. I made the custard by hard whipping one cup of cream and folding it into this vanilla pudding recipe. It's my go to custard recipe and is super easy to make!

Now let me talk about the frosting. I've always loathed American buttercream because it's overly sweet, heavy, and not smooth enough. I'd always heard that Italian buttercream was superior but a little worried about making it. A few months ago I decided to go ahead and finally try it and all the work was definitely worth it! I used this recipe and it was just a dream! Ai and I have an unhealthy love for butter (we don't eat it very often, but when we do we really go for it!) and if we could, we'd eat the whole batch of buttercream together! Make sure you follow the recipe very closely. It's not too difficult, but takes a lot of patience to get just right.

Finally, the decorations were made using our usual marshmallow fondant.

We're so proud of how this cake turned out. It's definitely the best cake we've done so far.

The baby monkey is just so cute! 

The mama monkey is a classy gal! 

Daddy monkey is just as adorable as baby! 

We had a lot of fun making these wooden cakes filled with bananas!

That's all for this week folks! We hope that you all are inspired to make your own beautiful monkey themed goodies! Happy baking and happy crafting!♥  

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Crazy about Ganache

So I've been on a ganache binge lately. Truth be told, I've always been too afraid to even go anywhere near ganache. I always thought that it was something too difficult and too beautiful to be made at home. After doing some research, turns out that I was dead wrong. Ganache is hands down the easiest and most beautiful thing you can make to decorate your desserts. 

Ganache is so versatile and absolutely delicious. After checking out a few recipes this was my favorite. Her recipe is easily adjustable for either larger or smaller quantities. There is one thing I need to confess here: I took a bit of a shortcut and used semisweet chocolate chips and heated the cream in the microwave! I have no idea if that's a no no, but the ganache turned out excellent. A word of caution with the chocolate chips though, you should definitely chop them up or run them through the food processor. 

I used the ganache as a glaze for some spring themed cupcakes:

I whipped it up and covered a cake with it:

Whipping it turns it into the most luscious and fudgey frosting you've ever had in your entire life!

I used it to glaze an entire cake (which I still have to work on getting the sides to be completely smooth) :

The recipe is a definite keeper! I can't wait to try to make truffles with the ganache and many more yummy things. 

That's all for this week folks! Don't be afraid to try ganache. I'm sure all of you can do it! Happy baking and happy crafting! ♥  

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Fun Kid Friendly Easter Egg Cake Pops

Happy Easter everyone! So I know that I'm a little late with this post, but I didn't want to make the pops too far in advance. I ended up doing these yesterday and wanted to have the blog up yesterday too, but I didn't have enough time. You guys will just have to save this project up for next Easter! 

The idea for these pops struck me when I saw all the cute mini plastic eggs at the store. It also occurred to me that we all tend to get carried away doing lavish and ornately beautiful cake pops which never seem like they would be something a kid could easily help with. So these pops are both cute and kid friendly. 

To make these you'll need:

• All the basic cake pop ingredients. I used this chocolate cake and frosting recipe. It made about 45 cake pops.
• Mini plastic eggs.
• I only needed 2 bags of candy melts. If you want to lots of different colors, then you'd probably only need about half a bag of melts. 
• An assortments of sprinkles.
• Small treat bags and thin ribbon

By now most of you know how to make cake pops with your eyes closed, but if you're new to the party then head on over to Bakerella's original tutorial. But instead of shaping the eggs by hand, you use the mini plastic eggs! If you've got a lot of kids over the job will be done in no time. To shape them, I took a clump of cake about the size of the eggs, shoved it in there and squeezed out all the excess. This does make things a bit messy because all the buttery goodness gets all over the eggs, but I'm sure the kids will have a lot of fun!

Before you start dipping the pops, set up a table with all the sprinkles poured out into bowls for the kids. You do the dipping and hand the pops over to the kids for decorating and let them get crazy. The sprinkles guarantee that each pop will be beautiful and I know that the kids will come up with some unique sprinkle combinations! 

As a side note I decorated all my pops myself. My sisters weren't really up for helping >_<

I thought these little flower sprinkles were very easter.

The pops were for an Easter party, so I wrapped them up in mini treat bags and tied them with pastel colored ribbons.

Using the eggs made the cake go very far. So make sure you enlist a couple of kids to make the work faster and more fun.

That's all for this week! Hope you all had a lovely Easter! Happy crafting and baking! ♥  

Wedding Cake and Poker Chip Cookies

Ai and I have been busy bees this month! Ai's co-worker had a vegas themed wedding recently and Ai wanted to give her a cake as a gift. We were told to do whatever we want and Ai came up with a really beautiful design! We kept it simple by having the cake toppers be a bride and groom cookie and adding a few sugar butterflies and fondant flowers. 

The bride cookie was decorated with royal icing and sugar pearls.

The groom cookies

We made poker chip cookies! 

We had a few hiccups along the way, but the cake ended up really lovely.

I love the bride and groom cookies. Ai got the idea from Pinterest! 

Ai came up with the clever idea to put a small tiered cake to prop up the cookies.

We really fell in love with these sugar butterflies, so expect to see them everywhere! 

We had a lot of fun making this cake and it's amazing to see how far we've progressed! That's all for this week folks! Halloween is coming up and we're super excited to reveal this year's costumes and can't wait to see yours! ♥