Cars Birthday Goodies

My friend Susan is throwing a Cars themed birthday this weekend for her little guy, Thomas, who is turning three.  She wanted a couple dozen cookies and cupcakes and gave me free reign to put something together for her.  I came up with a Lightning McQueen styled sugar cookie with a "3" instead of the original "95" he usually sports and some decadent double chocolate cupcakes with coordinating custom wrappers and picks.   Take a look to see the progression and the final products. Enjoy!

The Lightning McQueen cookies were labor intensive, but I'm really pleased with the results!  I did a trial run to try and figure out if I could recreate the character in royal icing:

Trial run

Some minor tweaks were made to the original prototype; nix the blue eyes, simplify the grille, swap out black headlights for white ones, and bling out the tires with black sugar crystals. And voila!  Below is the final product.

The cookies then got bagged and tagged with custom birthday labels and ribbon to be given out as fab edible favors  to party goers.

The cupcakes were less intensive, but still a great addition to her theme with the use of custom picks and wrappers.

Happy birthday, Thomas!

Preview: Camping Wedding

Edible terrariums!

First Catering Gig!

Busy, busy, busy! I booked my first professional catering gig recently creating desserts for the crazy talented Jeff Lavia from Dinner MoJo, and was asked to provide one hundred mini cupcakes and one hundred cake pops for a private "winter lodge" themed Christmas party. Having a ton of chocolate ganache left over from our Haute Chocolate fund raiser, I psychotically decided to bust out over a hundred truffles for the party to showcase what I can do, in hopes of booking future jobs.

Adorable mini spice cupcakes with cream cheese frosting

Chocolate cake pops with snowflake sprinkles.

Truffle mania!

And the party was gorgeous! Everything was already set up at the dessert table. I just filled in their cake stands with the treats and left them with pan after pan of goodies to be replenished throughout the night. What a great first experience!

All the extra work was totally worth it when I received this text from Jeff: "People are raving about the desserts!! And that was probably the best cake pop I've had. And the truffles - omg - those were the best truffles I've ever had, hands down. Great job!!! I was not expecting the hard shells and the soft chocolate inside." Hooray for rave reviews!

Haute Chocolate

So excited to share pictures from our hugely successful, first-ever grass roots attempt at fund raising for our co-op preschool, which is in danger of closing due to budget cuts. My partner in planning this little event, Erin, and I wracked our brains for ways to raise money when it dawned on us: ladies love chocolate!

We came up with our "Truffles for Tots" idea calling it a Haute Chocolate party where we would do a truffle making demo, get the ladies nice and lubed up on cheap red wine and ask for donations. Never having done anything like this before, we crossed our fingers and hoped to raise $300. We had such a great turn out and unbelievably generous donors that we tripled that and actually raised almost $900.00!

Two Buck Chuck disguised with custom labels.

The perfect donation vessel for our event.

We did a dry run to work out the kinks of the truffle making portion of our event and, with all the lengthy refrigeration needed in between steps, decided it would be impractical to have our guests be hands on, as originally planned. This left me with the daunting task of cranking out over ten dozen truffles in time for the party. Needless to say, I am a proficient truffle maker now.

Here is the phenomenal recipe I used from Mr. Chocolate himself, Jacque Torres. I tweaked it to avoid the whole tempering chocolate business (I am less proficient in candy thermometer usage) by using chocolate candy melts instead. The truffles were then boxed up and wrapped as take home thank yous.

Take home truffle boxes

I put together a scaled down version of one of my dessert tables, adding a couple of hot savory appetizers for guests to nibble on.

Love how the banner turned out.

Banner detail

With a cherry on top!

Hot Chocolate on a Stick

Hot  Chocolate on a Stick.