futurama returns, and so do my cupcakes!

So, yeah. I haven't made cupcakes in a while. But I've been busy being social! With the return of Futurama, I decided to make themed cupcakes again. Of course Futurama came back the day I left to visit my brother in Japan. Then I was jet-lagged for the next week. After that I don't really have an excuse except I finally got an event to bring these cupcakes to! Allen & Joe, 2 of my coworkers, had their last day working with us today. And Joe & I have discussed Futurama many times at work. So I made these last night.

I used a box cake mix. Whenever I decorate, I don't do "from scratch." Too much time!! So here's how I brought Futurama to culinary life.

By the way, if you're not familiar with these characters, you can catch the show on Comedy Central at 10pm on Thursday nights! Or right now you can do a google image search or something to see pictures of them!

My first attempt was Bender. This didn't go too well.

Hahahaha. Yikes. I got pretty depressed after this one. Then I tried again:


Aaaaaah! This one makes me so happy!!! Here's what happened: (there's a little Monk reference for those of you who used to watch Monk) Bender totally needed a better mouth. I bought a few different colored bags of melting chocolates (white, purple, orange) thinking I'd use them for the eyes and hair (Leela & Fry). But I was sure I was awful at that whole "just melt the chocolates in a ziploc bag and snip the corner to trace any shape at all, easy as 1, 2, 3!" I think it's because the first time I tried it, I followed the directions and microwaved it for what turned out to be way too long so the chocolate melted right through the bag without my knowledge and I got very hot melted chocolate all over my hands. That might have something to do with it.

Well I have gumption if anything, so I tried, tried again. Really all it took was microwaving it for less time. So I made a bunch of oval shapes for Bender's mouth and got that shape up there. Then I took a toothpick and scratched little lines in it for his "teeth." As for the antenna:

Are you familiar with Pocky? The amazing Japanese snack that consists of a thin biscuit dipped in chocolate? For some reason I think the crowd that's into Futurama knows Pocky very well. Anyway, it turns out Pocky is a cupcake-decorator's best friend. Look what can be done!

I dipped part of the Pocky in white icing and rolled it around in silver sprinkles. Then I snapped off half of it and stuck the rest into Bender's head. It worked!!


Then I did Dr. Zoidberg, which was the most satisfyingly simple character to make. Pink icing and pink Good & Plenty's. (Would that be the good part or the plenty part? I think they're both good... But I like how the white ones leave white on my tongue..)


Woop woop woop!

Then I did Nibbler, which is my favorite as far as these cupcakes are concerned.

Vanilla & chocolate frosting, black icing, 2 Necco wafers (I forgot to mention I've been using those as the eyes for everyone. And I thought Necco was a useless candy!), a Pocky, cut pieces of a white melting chocolate (as the fangs) and a white M&M! I got the M&M to stick with--ready??--melting chocolate AS GLUE! Yeah I know it's been done before, but I haven't done it before, and it was really exciting that it worked. See?

I love it!!

Of course I had to make Hypnotoad. Of course!!

I was pretty excited over making this one, and getting the icing to pull into a lip just right.. and using sprinkles as the brown spots--I liked keeping the cupcake element in the design!

So here's what I had so far:

Oh except I'd added Bender's mouth, too. Then it was time for the really tricky ones. Fry & Leela!

Here's my ziploc (oh, I'm sorry, it's actually Hefty!) pastry bag.. and my sketch of Leela's hair, with two of the FIVE Leela hairs I made (I put a lot of chocolate in there, I didn't want to waste it. Plus I thought I'd probably done some of them terribly wrong and I wanted options). I then put the wax sheet on a magazine in the fridge. The next morning my dad asked me if I knew why the Williams-Sonoma catalog was in the fridge. He was afraid my mom had gone crazy.

So here she is, I know, it doesn't do her justice, but I think the continued use of Good & Plenty was quite effective!! If she were blue she'd totally look like Smurfette. Except a cyclops. Cyclops Smurfette.

Here's Fry's hair, followed by the Fry cupcake:

Again, the frosting lip looks great here (sorry!! I don't mean to brag!! I'm just really happy!) which was kind of an accident. Serendipity, we call it. But I had to add the black icing just to make it not look like a fleshy mess:

Thank you, Matt Groening, for making their eyes so perfectly round. M&Ms for the eyes here, and the nose is, once again, a Good & Plenty, rolled in the face icing (ew.. "face icing").

I wanted to make the devil. I really wanted to. And I was all into it and excited until I realized I DIDN'T have Runts or that other candy shaped like tiny bananas that I used on the Monsters, Inc. cake pops that time... So I improvized and used Spree candies, but I had to bite into them to make the horn shape. Therefore I couldn't bring them into work in case someone ate the devil and I had to live with the fact that they ate my half-eaten candies. But I made it anyway, for myself, and here he is:

You can see my bite-marks on his horns. Nice.

Then I HAD to make Morbo, mostly because I have the vinyl figurine of him from those awesome mini figures by Kid Robot. I really want Slurms McGee but alas. I have not found him.

There he is, veins and all. I used purple sprinkles for his mouth because it was pretty late by the time I got around to Morbo and I didn't have purple icing. I went in the "vein" (haha) of Hypnotoad in my "cupcake elements" decoration technique. Morbo himself helped:

Hahahha. Ok. That's the last one! The gang's all here!

Actually, here are ALL of them:


And how I packaged them to bring to work:

I added 6 cupcakes with normal chocolate frosting on them so people wouldn't feel bad eating them (yes, that happens, and it's a really nice compliment!! but I'm also really happy when people eat them!) and so there'd be more than just 12!! Everyone loved them. I was walking on air today. Thanks, friends!! And goodbye & good luck, Joe & Allen!! :)

where the wild things are... cupcakes!

So I was Max from Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak this Halloween. We'd had all these promotional displays at work (movies based on books are a big deal for bookstores), and I saw the movie a few weekends ago. So with all this ado about it, and the cute hat Max wears, how could I not be him for Halloween?


Also, when I was making the Monsters, Inc. cake pops last month, I got a bunch of ideas for Where the Wild Things Are-themed baked goods. So I thought, why not make cupcakes to match my costume?? And share the wealth with my co-workers?

I started out with a batch of devil's food cupcakes (how appropriate!) and whipped vanilla frosting. I got all the decorating candies at Fuzziwigs. The sprinkles were all Wilton. I also bought more melting chocolates (the ones I had were peppermint--I wanted to use white chocolate).

I thought I'd try making a monster first (rather than Max) since I was so excited... Here's the decorating ideas I laid out on wax paper:

Ha! Things are lookin' good. The eyes are yellow Spree candies, the noses are heart-shaped hard candies. The horns, beak and head-feathers are all gummy fruit wedges. The red hair is sour tape and the black hair is licorice (which I ended up not using because it had hardened and was difficult to cut, plus it was hard to chew and didn't taste too good anyway). Oh and the blue nostrils on the bull-looking face are chocolate-covered sunflower seeds!

I decided to make the bird-monster first. He seemed to have the simplest structure: beak, feathers, eye. I put white nonpareil sprinkles on the bottom half to look like the small feather pattern. Then I stuck on the fruit wedges and the Spree eye:

Of course there's a bottom part to the beak and many more feathers that could go in there, but I didn't have any extra fruit wedges to spare. Plus the oven was on and it happened to be a warm Halloween, so the pieces began to slide off. He spent the rest of the decorating time in the fridge!

I then separated some of the vanilla frosting into a bowl and put one drop of red food coloring and one drop of yellow to make a peach skin tone. (I had taken notes on Maurice's artwork from his book during my break at work so I'd know what colors and shapes to use!) It looks kind of like the "anything muppets" Jim Henson had--the kind you add things to to give it a personality:

Look it has a mouth! I didn't mean to do that! I decided to make this one the redhead (being one myself):

Aww... The teeth are white chocolate melts cut into small triangles, and the mouth was that old trick of putting icing in a Ziploc, pushing it to the corner, and snipping a tiny hole (if you don't have a fancy pastry bag!).

I made Max next by icing a cupcake with white, then the skin-tone over it on the middle-to-bottom part. I rimmed the white edges in white sparkling sugar. My original plan was to melt some of the white chocolate and pipe it out in triangle shapes for the ears. Well, I put them in a Ziploc bag in a bowl and microwaved them. The directions said to knead in between microwaving, but I found out too late that the chocolate had melted through the bag! Melted chocolate got all over my hand--ow! So I suggest microwaving in 10-second intervals instead of 30!

That incident kind of killed the dream of shaping melted chocolate into whatever I desired, so I went with the simpler approach of cutting the melting wafers into triangle shapes (duh) and stuck those in. I then used the chocolate icing to draw his face. My first attempt looked like Doug Funnie in a Max costume:

Then I realized he looked too nice and I went for the true Max face:


I am SO proud of this one! I hope it would make Maurice proud, too. The chocolate icing really behaved as it came out of the bag, and the sugar really looks like fuzz!

I used the redhead face template again to make the "main character" monster (I've always seen him as the main character even though that nice bull-like one is on the cover). You know, the one with the striped shirt (body). I used that amazing European chocolate bar, Flake, as the hair and beard. I broke it up into small pieces and spread them around the head. Then I piped some more chocolate icing around it:

The horns are also the melting wafers, just cut in half.

Then I made my personal favorite, the bull-like one. This one gets to be blue! I put a drop of blue food coloring in a Dixie cup full of icing and put that on the cupcake. I added the eyes, fruit wedges (horns and ears), sunflower seeds (nostrils), icing mouth and melting wafer teeth (cut into square shapes). I almost forgot about the blue sprinkles I had picked up the day before!! I think that was the finishing touch that made this one come out so nicely. The one in the book has a mound of fluff or fur on top of his head which the glitter mimicked pretty well:

The plate even looks like the plants from Where the Wild Things Are!

So here they all are together:

And on a plate:

Yay!!

With the leftover cupcakes and what remained of the decorations (not much), I made some blue claw cupcakes and some title cupcakes:


The claws are--you guessed it!--white chocolate melting wafers cut in half! I'm so glad I bought those.

I made these to bring into work with my costume on, so here they all are in the amazing Cupcake Courier:


A few close-ups!!

This one has some significance if you've seen the movie:


And of course here's me in my costume holding my darlings:


Here I am with my costumed co-workers/friends:
Colonel Mustard, his girlfriend The Maid (both from Clue), Billy Mays in front of them, Paper Bag Princess (from the Robert Munsch book of the same name), a Pirate, Peter Pan, and me, Max!

Here is one of the cupcakes with his stuffed animal counterpart:

Here's one last picture taken at work with the artwork we usually have above the hardcover picture books:

They were then left in the break room where the REAL wild things are ;) Happy Halloween!