Toadstool and Dragonfly cookies for Polkadot Prints Down in the Garden Party

You must pop on over and check out the lovely Down in the Garden Party created by Jordan of Polkadot Prints that has been featured on Hostess with the Mostess.


The cute little toadstools and dragonflies were made by little ole me.


The pictures there are oh so cute and the styling is so very cool and check out the printables and packaging which is all available at Polkadot prints.

I had a bit of fun working on this as I really like toadstools, I may have driven Jordan kinda a bit crazy emailing her different designs.


See here is an example of the craziness, want to know how many cookies will fit in your treat bag, I'll send you a picture of a few different cookies next to a ruler.

Oh and Besser nice work on that ruler I got in a sample bag like 15 years ago at the Ekka (fair), advertising is still paying off ;)

Toadstool Cookies

The toadstool cookies were hand cut chocolate sugar cookie decorated with hand cut rolled fondant and the white dots were a icing sugar glaze. Well actually just water and icing sugar mixed up to the consistency I wanted.

(The test cookies were all rolled fondant)

Dragonfly Cookies

The dragonflies were made using a cookie cutter from Details Details and decorated with fondant, silver cashous, white glaze, silver luster dust and the bodies were a mixture of cocoa and icing sugar, the same recipe I used for the cross on the hot cross muffins I made CLICK here for link. The chocolate glaze was not the best for piping but I was really loving the taste at the time. I just piped it in one big thick line up the middle.

Here is one of the reject dragonfly samples, he was too cute, sometime life is like that :(

Credits

Top 4 photos by Polkadot Prints
Party styling printables treat bags etc by Polkadot Prints

Coconut Easter Eggs fun for the kids

I love to spend time in the kitchen with my kids. We always have a great time even though more often than not it means 3 times the cleaning at the end.

Making these super sweet coconut Easter eggs together has become a tradition that we enjoy together every year. Sometimes we invite along friends and make it a Easter egg making party along with a bit of Easter basket making craft and the kids get to take home all the eggs they make at the end.

Make sure that everyone washes their hands before you start....although once you start there will probably be lots of hand licking. For that sticky spitty reason I like to make sure that everyone has a separate basket ready to pop their finished eggs into.


The sweet baskets in the pictures are from Sharnel Dollar Designs.

Coconut Easter Eggs make around  30 eggs

Ingredients

500gm icing sugar sifted
3 cups dessicated coconut
1 tin condensed milk
1 tsp vanilla (optional)
food colour

Combine icing sugar, coconut, condensed milk and vanilla in a large bowl and mix well and all ingredients are combined evenly. I love to let the kids do the mixing even though it takes a little bit longer and a lot of cleaning up afterwards. As this mixture is quite firm you might need to help the kids out towards the end.

Divide mixture into 4 and colour as desired. Make sure the colour is mixed in well and distributed evenly. If it's just for the family I don't see any problems with letting the kids mix the colour in with their freshly washed hands squashing it together and kneading it.

At this stage the mixture should not be too wet, you can leave it uncovered for 10mins or so to let it set a bit, or if you are concerned you have added to much colour pop a tiny bit extra coconut and icing sugar to firm it up.

Break off small pieces about the size of a ping pong ball and roll between the palms of your hands to form into an egg shape. This part is especially fun for kids and I always let mine break off sections and roll however they want. Making perfect eggs is not important but having fun is.

If you would like to make 'real' looking eggs leave some of the mixture plain and colour some yellow to make 'yolks'. Make the yellow into a tiny ball and then flatten out a ping pong ball sized piece of natural colour mixture, flatten it out and wrap around the yellow 'yolk'. Roll the egg in between your palms until it resembles an egg in shape.

Eggs can be stored in an airtight container for at least 7 days if they last that long.

Easter Egg Nests with Rose Fairy Floss Cupcake Toppers

My lovely friend Sandy surprised me the other day with a packet of super cute striped cupcake papers, some rosewater and beautiful rose persian fairy floss.

Oooohhh I thought to myself, what a lovely bunch of cakey things I'll have to make something special with them, and so I did.

They inspired me to make these very sweet Easter Egg nest Cupcake Toppers.

I am in love with the rose Persian Fairy Floss, it is so silky and stringy looking, it has a different texture to normal fairy floss. However sadly just like real floss it does not last long once out of it's packet and after a few hours my toppers had melted into a soggy nest. They still looked ok just not as spectacularly fluffy as when I originally made them. I would say make them just before your about to pop them out on display.

Also the Robert Gordon Paper Cups.....soooooo cute, however they do look a bit greasy when baked with a high butter content vanilla cupcake (and really do you want any other sort?) I just popped another one over the top and it looked fine. They are a significant improvement on the older, yet still super pretty ones.  I'm wondering if the Australian regulations limit the amount of plastic/waxish coating they can use I remember reading somewhere an issue with the Wilton nut cups in the US.

They do make cute containers regardless, see them with the mini Easter eggs.

Tutorial for Easter Egg Nest Cupcake Toppers

Ingredients
Cupcakes topped with a buttercream swirl
Fondant in various pastel colours
Persian Fairy Floss ( www.pariya.com)
mini Easter eggs - these ones were from Big W in Australia

Using a blossom cutter cut out fondant in the desired colour. My Blossom cutter was 6cm and I used a variety of pastel colours. Place the cut out shapes onto parchment paper and allow to set for a few days.

Make cucpakes and decorate with a swirl of buttercream.

Top each cupcake with a fondant disk.

Pull out small sections of the fairy floss ensuring your hands are clean and very dry. Shape the floss into small nests to fit on top of the fondant blossom disks.

Finally place a couple of small Easter eggs into the nests.

And the winner is........

OK I have a winner.

I used Random Org and the result was:

Result: 74 Powered by RANDOM.ORG

So I counted through the comments 3 times and it looks like the winning comment was:

Jeanne who said....and now I follow you on Facebook!!

Her previous comment she said she would choose the Crabapple Bakery Cupcake Cookbook and the Whimsical Bakehouse which are really nice choices.

Jeanne if you could email me @ bubbleandsweet@hotmail.com and confirm that those are the 2 cookbooks you would like and provide me with your address I will have them ordered for you asap.

Sorry to all those who missed out but if you click on the links below they will take you to fishpond who have free Australian shipping and pretty good prices.



The Crabapple Bakery Cupcake Cookbook


Secrets of Macarons


More From Magnolia: Recipes from the World Famous Bakery and Allysa Torey's Home Kitchen


Whoopie Pies


Planet Cake: A Beginner's Guide to Decorating Incredible Cakes


50 Easy Party Cakes


Romantic Cakes


Whimsical Bakehouse: Fun-to-make Cakes That Taste as Good as They Look

Hot Cross Bun Cake Pops for Easter

Ok so I've been having a little bit of trouble getting into the Easter decorating groove.

I love a cute bunny cookie as much as the next person, but honestly there are so many really great ones already out there I just don't think I can add anything amazingly inspirational just at the moment.

So instead I'm going with super yummy.

These were supposed to be a lightly spiced cake ball based on the Hot Cross Muffin recipe of mine published HERE in the March 2011 Peekaboo magazine.


Instead they ended up being chocolate cake. I decorated a cake for my niece's 7th birthday on the weekend and carved a bit off to make a bag shape, and we all know that cake pops are the perfect way to use up all that excess cake and frosting.


Here is a quick peek of the cake I made for my niece. The instructions to make this cake is from 50 Easy Party Cakes by Debbie Brown. If you'd like to win the cookbook so you can make your very own make up bag cake like this one CLICK HERE as I have a competition running until the 14th of April 2011 to win 2 cookbooks.

Oh and here is my token bunny.....but he's not edible, my daughter stuck him on while I was taking the pictures and I kinda though it was cute.


Instructions after jump

Cookbooks giveaway, WIN 2 cookbooks to celebrate my 1year Blogivesary

How time flies when your having fun. My 1 year Blogiversary is coming up at the end of the month and I'm so excited about it I would like to offer one of you the chance to win 2 cookbooks from the ones listed below.


The Crabapple Bakery Cupcake Cookbook


Secrets of Macarons


More From Magnolia: Recipes from the World Famous Bakery and Allysa Torey's Home Kitchen


Whoopie Pies


Planet Cake: A Beginner's Guide to Decorating Incredible Cakes


50 Easy Party Cakes


Romantic Cakes


Whimsical Bakehouse: Fun-to-make Cakes That Taste as Good as They Look

Open to my lovely readers everywhere. Entries open until the 14th of April 2011.  

YES this is open Internationally.

To enter you must complete step 1 and enter a comment to let me know. Step 2 and 3 are optional but if you do them add a separate comment for an extra entry.

1. Follow this blog and then tell me which of the 2 listed cookbooks you would like to win. Existing followers just say in the comment

2. Step 1 and also follow me on facebook

3. Step 1 above and tell your friends on your facebook page or blog about this giveaway.

Prize is 2 cookbooks from the ones listed above to be chosen by the winner including postage to the winners address. Winner will be chosen using radom org and the winner will be announced on this blog.

Ben Ten cake pops with mini M &M's

I'm having a bit of bloggers block at the moment.

Yup I have been a bad blogger, nothing inspiring cooked around here the last week of so. Well I did make some of my triple chocolate cookies but y'all have seen those done so I didn't take any pictures.

oh and I did make a cake for my nephew but it was a last minute thing the night before and I used a Harry Potter cake box mix that someone had given me.

So I went back through my archives to try and rustle up some photo's to share with you and found these.

OK the reason I never posted these before is not because they were not totally awesome, it's because I took pretty awful photo's which often happens when I am making something for someone else.

These are some Ben Ten Pop's I made last year for the owner and designer of Australian Made kids fashion line Little Miss J and Mister TJ, well for her son really.

I made the pops with chocolate cake and mini M & M's, which I think is perfect for little boys. Just make up your chocolate cake, add enough frosting so it will be moist and holds it's shape remember not sloppy and the add a handful of mini m&m,s.

OK you need to be a little restrained on the M & M's too many and you will have difficulty popping you lollipop stick into the pop.

Here is a picture of the pop's, I shaped them using a small round fondant cutter and pressing the cake pop mixture in and flattening the top. Then I chilled the mixture and went through and popped the lollipop stick into each one to make a hole, this is pretty important with the M & M pops because if you poke into one of the candies there is no getting through you just need to start in another spot. Some times it's easier to scrap the whole pop and reshape it.

(If you look closely you can see where I had to make a second hole as I could not push through the candy)

Chill the pops again and in the meantime melt your chocolate/ candy melts. Take the pops out of the fridge and insert the lollipop sticks by dipping them into the melted chocolate and pushing them into the pre-made holes. Chill them in the fridge again.

One the lollipop sticks are set you can dip the whole pop in the melted chocolate and set standing up in styrofoam.

With these Ben Ten pops I had pre-made rounds of fondant using the same round fondant cutter and cutting the triangle shapes using a pizza cutter wheel, after the chocolate on the pops were dry I attached the fondant rounds with a little melted chocolate and held them a couple of seconds until secure.