Summer Grillin' - Cupcake Style!

 

Summer is here and it is most definitely BBQ season!.. More than it usually is in our house anyway!

 

We celebrated our friend's 30th birthday the other day with lots of delicious bbq food and a great evening, topped with a donut tower birthday cake (what a great birthday when it lands on National Donut Day!), cake and then also more cupcakes from me!  Perfect!

 

I went with the BBQ theme seeing as that's what we were going for, and it is the season after all! 

 

 

 

Using the same recipe for Coca-Cola Cupcakes as my New Home Cupcakes over a year ago, I thought it was time to use this recipe again, especially as the birthday boy is a fellow coke lover.  They're a little different to regular "cupcakes", with a super dense cake part, and a delicious glaze - with no swirl of buttercream.  This meant I wanted cupcake toppers that were flat, 2D rather than 3D ones so it would lay flat on the surface of the cupcake glaze.

 

So I got to work creating the BBQ themed fondant cupcake toppers.  First up were the burgers.  These were my first idea, and the one I definitely knew how it should look.  I coloured small amounts of fondant a brown colour for the burger, and then a yellow-brown colour for the bun, and used a sharp end of a cake decorating tool to make little "sesame seed" indents.

 

 

Next was the ketchup and mustard!  A little out of scale compared to the burger, but who wouldn't rather have a big burger!?

 

 

Then the choice was between making a '30' cupcake with some birthday decorations, or doing a third BBQ topper.  I went for a third design on the same theme, tying it all together with some corn!  Green and yellow fondant coloured and then cut out with various parts of cookie cutters to get the shapes and sizes I wanted.  The green part came from a maple leaf cutter, and the corn part from the little finger on a high-five hand cookie cutter.  Just using what I had instead of free-styling the cutting!  Then I used the end of a cake decorating tool that looks like a scalloped shell on the end to create the texture of corn.



 Fondant cupcake toppers all done - giving them a little chance to dry out/harden slightly through the morning.  This was some seriously early cupcake prep - after not getting back to sleep at 5.30am on a Friday where I wasn't working, I decided the only way to be productive that day was to just accept that sleep was done for the day and I might as well start baking!

 

So, with the Coca-Cola cupcakes baked, and cooling, and the glaze deliciously smooth ready to be spread over the cupcakes - see the recipe here - it was time to decorate!

 

The great thing about decorating with cupcake toppers when they are already made is that, once the cupcakes are baked up, everything is ready to go!  Assembly is nice and easy, and in fact, it made the early baking wake up worth it!

As the recipe is already on an old post, all that is left to share are some close ups of the cupcakes, and more photos!

Which is your favourite design of the 3?  I think I still love my original idea of the burger, but I also am really pleased with how the corn turned out!

 

 

Perhaps you'll give them a bake this weekend for Father's Day, or for a BBQ Birthday coming up this Summer!  Have fun with fondant cupcake topper prep - and then enjoy how easy everything is to put it together once you're done baking :)   I'd love to see your BBQ cupcakes if you try them!!

 

Happy BBQ Season!!

DIY Stamped Hankies for Dad

9th June is a perfectly acceptable time to blog about Christmas presents right?... Right?!

Well today I thought I would share with you one of our handmade Christmas presents from last year that was made before this blog was!  I had a bunch of posts ready to go for the day I made my blog public (nearly 6 months ago, yey!) but I thought I would save up all of our handmade Christmas gifts for other times, and this one seems pretty appropriate for this time of year seeing as they were the presents made and given to our Dads!  ... Yes we did similar, but not exact same gifts for both Jonathan's and my, Dad... does anyone else do this?  Doubling up on gifts?  It worked for us seeing as we will never share Christmas Day with both families (being 3000 miles away from one another!)

For Christmas last year we (I) did some sewing, some crafting with paint and then this gift, which Jonathan was able to be creatively involved in as well!!

We chose to do some DIY handkerchiefs, stamped with fabric paint in designs appropriate for each Dad.

First step:  find what you want to give!  We chose handkerchiefs and bought a big pack from Sears.  We struggled a bit to find perfectly plain white cotton ones, so many had fancy designs on - and often were in weird, impossible to find, places in the shop but eventually we got exactly what we wanted!

We prewashed the handkerchiefs (some of them frayed a little in the dryer - I guess we shouldn't have put them in) but there were enough left still intact for us to use.  They definitely needed a LOT of ironing to get the creases out, so we did all this before stamping.

We had already bought the fabric stamp pad from Michael's (much easier to find).  We thought about using paint, but then on seeing the stamp pad it was clearly what we wanted.  Easy to use and less mess!  They had a few different colours, but we chose black :-)

Next up were the actual stamp designs.  I had read a few posts about making your own stamps, using exacto knives, or using foam shapes on polystyrene balls but none of these seemed right for us.  I did, however like the idea of the foam shape mounted on something and after trying a few things, bottle caps were what worked for us.  All that diet coke that gets drunk in this house pays off in the crafting department yey!

No pre-cut foam shapes for us though... Checked out some craft supplies and stores but all the packs were kid oriented shapes... Why no 'Dad' pack!?  So we bought a few sheets of plain foam and got to work on some finicky drawing and cutting!

For Jonathan's Dad we used a car and a hammer, and for mine, the same car but a beer bottle instead of the hammer!  The foam was sticky back which meant it was super easy (after the teeny tiny snips I had to do to cut it out...I think I ended up using nail scissors!) to attach to the bottle cap.

Following the instructions on the fabric stamp pad, we then left the project to dry for at least 3 hours.  Then to set the ink, we ironed the hankies!  Covering the designs with a thin cloth, applying the heat of the iron (dry iron, on the cotton setting) for 2 minutes... But of course, your fabric stamp pad might be slightly different - do check the instructions!

Before we could package the gifts up, we had to machine wash them again on a gentle cycle and this time did a gentle tumble dry (because of the earlier fraying) and they were fine this time, phew!

We gave them one last iron before packaging them up ready for Christmas... And now you're probably wondering why I'm writing this post today - either very late, or very early in the year but well it is FATHER'S DAY next Sunday and seeing as we made this handkerchiefs for our Dads I thought it would be a great time to slot this post in here and hopefully give some inspiration and ideas for some DIY gifts for next weekend!

I wouldn't be able to share a Father's Day gift on my blog if it truly was for this year because then he would know what it was!  So instead, a reference to a previous gift - so no ruined surprises!

Have a fun week, enjoy creating some handmade Father's Day gifts - I'd love to see your projects... especially if you make these stamped handkerchiefs :-D