Cupcakes - Pikachu

These are cupcakes I made of Pikachu (one of the characters in Pokemon - a show on the Cartoon Network). My nephews were obsessed with Pokemon (12 years ago) and my son got that gene passed down to him. I made these for this 6th birthday party at school . This photo is only half the batch because I ran out of those gummy candies that I used for the ears.

When I decided to make these, it was late, I was tired, it was raining hard outside and I had no cake mix. So, after going out to buy the mix, you can imagine I didn't think it through very well. The cake and face were simple. I used yellow frosting and black Wilton pre-made icing. For the rosy cheeks, I used M&M's.

The ears were the challenge. Since it was so late, I wanted to just use stuff we had in the house.  I tried: cutting graham crackers (too crumbly), cut corners of Madeline cookies (too soft), Gold fish (these actually worked but I didn't want to ice them, and they felt too small), and cut corners of marshmallows (these worked but, again, I didn't want to ice them to make them yellow.

Nothing I had at home actually worked. So I gave up, went to the store tonight and bought those gummy, sugar-coated wedge candies. The problem is, I needed 30 cupcakes and the box only had about 18 yellow wedges. So, I guess I have to go back to the store in a little while. 

The look on my son's face as the yellow cupcakes took shape into Pikachu was priceless and make it all worth the effort. 

Food fun - its Grill Time!

Happy Post 4th of July, everyone!

As the weekend approached, I got an email from Michaels showing these way cool cupcakes that looked like little grills. I put my own touches to it but basically, they are the same. Here are the ones I made.



Here are the 'instructions':

Fill silver foil cupcake liners about 2/3 full with packaged cake mix.
After baking and cooling, level off the cupcakes with a knife so that they are flat.
Ice with dark Chocolate frosting. I used Dunken Hines' Whipped Dark Chocolate.

Sprinkle Red sanding sugar in the center to simulate hot coals.
Select Black ready to use Wilton icing. Using a round piping tip, evenly squeeze lines across the icing to simulate the grill bars. (Michaels suggested silver bars using a mix of black and white - I don't know about you guys, but my grill has been black since day one. lol)

For the candies, I used yellow Jelly Belly jelly beans, wrapped with the green part of fruit roll ups. Did you guys know how hard it is to find green fruit roll ups? I ended up having to buy a mixed box of 3 different types, and cut the green part off of a 'double-sided' kind. This is sorta what the box looked like, only mine didn't come with tatoos.

To make the steaks, I cut the caramels into 3rds so that they were thinner and pinched them in at the bottom a bit.

The hotdogs were the pink and red Mike and Ike candies. And the burgers were some random bug shaped gummies I'd found and pressed way into the icing.


To make the grill marks on the candy, used cake decorating pens. They came in a set of 4 different colors in the baking aisle. They didn't have black, so I ended up using blue and they seemed to work just fine.