PJ Mask Cake

There must be something like a million bigillion cartoon shows for kids.  A family member asked me to make a PJ Mask Cake for her son's 3rd birthday and I just thought PJ WHAT??  Here is yet another cartoon show I know nothing about.

But a quick google search turned up silhouettes strutting around a cityscape bathed in a yellow glow of a rising moon.  I didn't know kid's cartoons could be so poetic, but then I realized the silhouettes had names like Catboy...

Gekko...

And Owlette!

LOL, so much for poetry.

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Anyway... the first step in this cake construction was to make the night time cityscape and the 3 character silhouettes.  I used Fondarific Black Fondant mixed with a little Wilton Tylose Powder.  The tylose power makes the fondant sturdier and able to stand up straight without any additional support.  It is a cheap-man's gumpaste.  I cut out the cityscape using a long razor slicer, and then I added some windows using yellow tinted fondant (Buttercup Yellow).  Next I made the big yellow moon that would hang behind the city.  Once both the moon and the cityscape were dry, I glued them together with some yellow candy melts and then glued bamboo skewers to the back with more candy melts.

Next I cut out the "Masks" from tinted fondant.  I found an image of the characters and printed the masks so they would fit the side of my cake (4" tall).  Here are all the templets I used.

I cut the printed mask images into the individual components and then used the paper cutouts as a guide to cut out the fondant.  For Catboy I used Wilton Royal Blue and Sky Blue food gels.

For Gekko I used Leaf Green and Electric Green gel food colors.  For Owlette I used Red Fondarific Fondant. (I hate, hate, hate tinting fondant a deep red so I just buy the ready made stuff.)  I also textured Gekko and Owlette with some cheese cloth.

For the "ribbon" around the base of the cake I used my trusty ACE Food Safe Extruder.  I love this thing.  It is one of my favorite (and most used) cake decorating tools.

For the lettering I used a font called Heros and Legends from the DAFonts.com website.   I typed Duke's name into the site's font viewer, printed the results, and then used the paper templet to cut out the fondant.  Funny almost accident here...  I cut out my paper "2" but then realized Duke was actually turning 3.  Glad I didn't deliver the cake with a 2 on it - that would have been embarrassing.

So here is the finished cake.  Happy 3rd Birthday, Duke.

Happy Decorating,

Carol



Supply List: 

Mona Lisa Fondant
Wilton Tylose Powder
14" Cake Drum
Royal Blue Gel Color
Sky Blue Gel Color
Electric Green Gel Food Color
Fondarific Black Fondant
Fondarific Red Fondant
Wilton's Yellow Candy Melts
Wilton's Buttercup Yellow Gel Color
Leaf Green Gel Colors
Cake Boss Decorating Tools
Razor Slicer
ACE Food Safe Extruder

Beach Theme Cakesicles

I saw the cutest new thing the other day -

Cakesicles!  

Well it was new to me.  I had never seen it before, and true to form - I HAD TO TRY IT.   A friend at work was having a beach themed wedding, so I justified my new purchases by telling myself it was part of her wedding gift.

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So what do you think?  I thought they were kind of cute, and actually I didn't buy much stuff to make them.  I bought a mini silicone seashell mold and two sizes of popsicle molds (one mini size and one small size).  I wasn't sure which size mold would work the best so I bought one of each to try them out. 

Here are the two molds being filled with my Slutty Brownies.  The red mold holds about 9 tablespoons of batter and the white one holds about 3 tablespoons.  Here are the brownies being layered together: brownie mix on the bottom, chopped up Twix Bars in the middle, and chocolate chip cookie dough on the top. 

And here they are just out of the oven.  I guess I overfilled the cavities because the brownies puffed up above the edge of the cavity.  But no worries, while the brownies were still hot I just squished everything back into the cavity.  Nothing better than dense, moist brownies with extra chocolate and caramel.

Here they are removed from the mini white one.  They were the perfect shape, and the brownie had no trouble staying on the stick even when I lifted it up.

However, the cakesicles from the red mold fell off the stick when I removed them from the mold.  I guess they were just too heavy for the size of the stick.  But I just took hunks of the brownie mixture and stuffed it into the white mold and made more of the mini cakesicles.

To complete the Beachy Cakesicles I dipped them in Wilton's blue Candy Melts, sprinkled some pulverized graham crackers on one side, and then decorated with sea shells made from white fondant.  But I have to say the Wilton Candy Melts didn't work very well.  Even though I thinned the melted candy with some vegetable oil it was still too thick.  I thought about starting over with a different type of chocolate, but then I decided the bumpy texture was okay because it was supposed to be water swirling around a sandy beach.

So in the end I was happy with my first attempt at cakesicles.  Now I just have to work on getting my chocolate coating all smooth and silky and luscious looking.

Happy Decorating,

Carol



Supply List: 

Mona Lisa Fondant
Wilton Blue Candy Melts
Graham Crackers
Mini white popsicle silicon mold
Full size red popsicle mold
Silicone seashell mold