A Baking Break

With the wedding season over for us I have time to finish up some photos from everything else that has been going on in our lives. So with that said, I wanted to share some baking photos from the past couple of get-togethers we have had, or at least from the couple I took photos during.

For our friend’s birthday we decided to make some specially designed cupcakes. Initially I was going to make Despicable Me Minion cupcakes from Nerdy Nummies, but eventually I decided to make Diglett and Dugtrio cupcakes (from the Pokemon series). They are super simple to make. Essentially we made regular cupcakes (from a box) and iced them with white icing. Then we cut ready to eat brownies into various sizes and stuck three brownie segments onto a cupcake to form a Dugtrio and one to make a Diglett. After that we put some eyes on using icing and stuck half a pink smartie on for his mouth/tongue (there is apparently a debate on whether the cartoon is his mouth open with a single tooth, or a close mouth, or a tongue sticking out). We then crushed some green and brown smarties to make the dirt and/or grass and placed that around the cupcake. I think they look pretty good and what’s even better is that they are darn tasty!!!

The second baking adventure I wanted to share is from just this past weekend when we had a Blizzcon get-together. You may remember that we went to Blizzcon last year and had a fantastic time!! This year, we decided to opt for the no travel, cost efficient option of virtual tickets. This essentially meant we got to stream all of the various events at Blizzcon online. We invited a bunch of our friends who happened to be Blizzard fans over and I of course made some yummy treats. Originally I was going to make several things, but the guest list started to dwindle as a ton of people came down with colds, the flu and even shingles. So I ended up just making these delicious brownie pops in the shape of Overlords and Zerglings from Starcraft. Though technically they are the Carbots Animations Starcrafts version of these characters (and therefore adorable).

These were a fair bit more intensive than the Diglett and Dugtrio cupcakes. The first step was to make brownies, I just used a box recipe for simplicity. Once the brownies are completely cooled, I took bits on them and rolled them into balls. Some of the balls I then shaped into Zergling by forming a head and four little feet, the rest I left in a ball shape to be the Overlords. Once the shapes were formed, I stuck a lollipop stick in each one and carefully dipped them in melted, purple chocolate (yay for wedding gifts in the form of chocolate melters!). The Overlords were pretty straight forward as I really just slowly dipped them in and then tapped the stick on the side to let the excess chocolate drip back into the melter.

The Zerglings were a little harder as I had to dip them in and then move the chocolate around to make sure their little feet got properly covered and that you could distinguish the difference between their heads and their backs. So I ended up using my fingers to move the chocolate around a bit. I then stuck the sticks in a block of styrofoam and let them harden. While they were hardening I took a toothpick a formed wings and tendrils on a sheet of waxed paper by dripping the leftover chocolate onto it. I then stuck these onto the hardened Zerglings back for wings and hanging down from the Overlords for their arms/tendrils by using more chocolate like a glue. The last step was to put on some details using a darker purple chocolate. I used some black food dye and made the chocolate a darker purple colour and then used a toothpick again to put eyes and a mouth on the Zerglings and some side roundy bit details on the Overlord as well as his eyes. I absolutely love how they turned out and they were so darn yummy!!

(And yes, I know I got the Overlords head features a little messed up, I gave him four eyes and two horns instead of two eyes and four horns…oops…also if you want to be true to the Starcrafts version, his detailing and eyes should be a lighter purple colour, not darker, but I couldn’t be bothered to dye the chocolate twice…he is still cute and delicious though!)