Star Wars Cake, Cupcakes & Cookies

These are what i have been so busy with. My friend Angela (Sweet-Tooth-Fairy) asked me to take on her client in her absence and she "pushed" me to accept it...knowing that i need to stop watching too much TV and get some work done. LOL!   

R2-D2 CAKE

Front View of R2D2 Cake

Side View of R2D2 Cake

R2-D2 & R2-M5 CUPCAKES

mini R2-D2 & R2-M5

mini R2-D2 & R2-M5

These are my diy cupcake wrappers in case you all are wondering..:) 

I downloaded a file on papercraft from a Japanese website and edited them in photoshop and adjusted to the size that i wanted for my cupcakes.  

STAR WARS  CHARACTER COOKIES

Star Wars character cookies. 

These cookies are harder to ice than i thought! I had a hard time trying to ice them esp. Boba Fett..took me a really long time that i almost tear my hair out..lol!

Many thanks to Angie (another friend name Angela..lol!) who carried the cutters all the way back from US. 

Misc Star Wars logo cookies

Just playing around with some designs with my extra cookie dough

These are totally inspired by Angela of Sweet Tooth Fairy and Callye of Sweet Sugar Belle. 

Cookies packed.  I did the labels on my own. :D 

Now i'm taking a break from baking...and a break from Star Wars...

Even though i didn't join HCB this week for the Genoise Tres Cafe, i did bake part of the cake and cupcakes from HCB recipes.  For cupcakes, i had to experiment & weigh the batter to the exact grams a bit to get a dome..and realised that flour (cake or all purpose) makes a difference to the texture and the density of the cake and the shape as well!

The only thing that didn't work from Rose's recipe was the pastillage taken from Cake Bible.   Not sure why but i made it twice and it was too wet, and i add lots of icing sugar before it even become a dough and it became crumbly later so i had to discard. 

Wedding Favor Cookies

Just got back from my hols on Friday and had to rush through my friend's order for wedding favor cookies, so i didn't have much time to comment on blogs or to catch up quite as quickly. I surprise myself sometimes - I managed to bake 120+ cookies on Saturday and then ice them all the very next day.  Oh..as usual, my husband is always at my back nagging as to what time i'm finishing and it's late etc, so i had to ignore him after a while...

My friend's wedding theme is pink, so all the cookies have to be in pink.   Cookies were made in 4 different flavors..and i used different recipe for each flavor (I like to try new recipes...i get bored easily...so i don't always stick to a particular recipe).  They all turned out quite yummy and sweet. :)

Wedding Favors: 喜喜 Heart Cookies

Wedding Favors: Lace Heart Cookies

Wedding Favors: Mini 'Love' Heart Cookies

Mini Cupcake Cookies

Snowflake Cookies

Candy Wrapper Cookies

The candy wrappers cookies imo weren't very well piped as i was rushing through and felt that my piping wasn't as delicate as i would like..plus my arm and hand were tired after icing 120+ cookies.   As you can see, i did the heart shaped cookies first and the rest later..  My friend's wedding is on Christmas Eve, so i added the snowflakes there so she can put on her dessert table.   

So here ends the part 1 of the wedding cookies...i'm working on part 2 tonight....hopefully I get them out on time as per my schedule..

Baby and Laces Cookies

We had long weekend holiday and I thought I had ample time to bake the cakes for ABC, HCB and cookies for my friend.  However, my daughter had a minor 'accident'  - she cut her finger (quite badly!) while doing her project and i had to rush her to a 24-hr clinic at night.  The doctor attending said it was minor and didn't give us anything and told us just to monitor. He didn't even have bandages in his clinic to dress up the wound and told me to go to the nearest pharmacy to buy and dress it up on  my own.  The next day, the cut on my daughter's finger was still red and bleeding, so i rushed her down to A&E and the doctor opened up the wound, examined it and said cut was quite deep and needed stitches!!  I can't believe that the earlier doctor just brushed it off so lightly.  

After all the worrying and rushing to the doctors, my baking plan went awry.  I didn't have time to bake anything.  However, i need to ice the cookies i've baked on Thursday...as I know i will be occupied the week later.

Hence decorated these baby shower cookies & lace cookies from Sunday night & over the next 2 nights till very late (or shall i say early morning..lol!). As usual, my husband nagged at me constantly (every 30mins interval after 10pm) if i'm done as it's getting late, that i needed to get to work the next day...otherwise, i will not have enough sleep and can't concentrate at work..and bad for my health..blah..blah..blah...

Baby Shower Cookies

Made these baby shower cookies for a friend. Her sister will be having a baby soon and because of some very Chinese tradition, she can't see her sister or baby till a month later after baby is born . I thought if my friend could give her sister some pretty cookies, that would be nice.  

Heart-Shape Lace Cookies

Round-Shape Lace Cookies

These heart & round lace cookies are just my "practice-to-pipe" cookies.  Saw some lovely lace cookies by my 2 flickr pals (Rosey Sugar & Jill Sugar) and thought i'll give it a go. Of course mine is no where near their standard..theirs are perfect and their piping always so delicate and pretty - I adore their work! I needed to practice piping round, so i made lots of round cookies.  However, i didn't really do a very good job..my round outline turned out quite terrible..some jagged edges, some diamond shape, some oval..some just out of shape round.. These above that you see are the 6 best rounds that i've done! LOL!  Gotta practice more! 

Cats Cookies

This design is taken from this book "Biscuiteers Book of Iced Biscuits" which i bought recently. I had limited time after work to pipe these, i used parchment cone only instead of the usual bag & tip, so less washing up to do ..:)

The ball of yarns, i wanted messy yarn balls (to be different from the book) but in the end they looked more like Cha-Soba (green tea noodles) ...LOL!  

Initially i wanted to make halloween cookies but somehow ended with these because i fell in love the design after seeing them in the book. Perhaps i just don't get the halloween thing since we don't celebrate here at all. We have the Chinese 7th-month "Ghost month" which is like the equivalent of halloween i think.  Back to the drawing board..hahaha...

Pixar UP Cookies

My daughter's birthday is coming up next week but she will be in away in Church camp and hence won't be celebrating with us. This is the first year she's away from home on her birthday. So i made her some birthday cookies of her fave cartoon characters for her to bring to camp.   I spent 2 days piping these...so tiring!!  My arm going to drop off already...  I thought i could finish in a day but i couldn't.. hence i didn't have time to bake this week's HCB assignment :(.

Overall, I'm happy with how the UP cookies turned out.  However, I still need to improve on the fine detail piping skill which i am lacking in (as what Chef Michel Roux Jr, judge of MasterChef-Pro always say "lacking the finesse...") I guess practice makes perfect but cooking decorating is extremely time consuming imo..and sometimes (actually, more like most of the time) i'm quite lazy to get my butt moving..:p ! 

Russell and his Wilderness Explorer, Grape Soda badges

Carl & his Home

Dug

Kevin

UP Cookies

Tiara cookies

Dress cookies

Cookies all packed and gift wrapped for my daughter

MH Birthday Cookies

Made this platter for my colleague MH's birthday. She has a sweet tooth so i hope she'll enjoy it.  At the same time practiced my piping too..lol! :D   Couldn't decide which photo looked better so i ended uploading both...:)   Happy Birthday MH!

Thank you all who left comments earlier on my Ironhot-heart cookies blog post.  All your lovely & kind comments have been most encouraging and gave me much confidence to try piping another batch of cookies this soon. :D  

Ironhot-heart Cookies

The cartoon characters drawn by my daughter. She's entering Uni to study design in a few months' time. I translated her drawings into cookies just for her.  Of course her drawing is much better than what i can pipe. This is the best i can do - for someone (me) who has piped less than 5x! Piping is my nemesis!  

Ironhot-Heart is the name of the robot (in case you don't know that's a robot..since a friend of mine thought the head looked like a monkey & the arms like prawns! :( Guess must be my bad piping skills for her to think that way!! lol! ) my daughter gave her cartoon characters.  And also to clarify that girl on the flower cookie is not a robot girl (which i thought it was initially and met with much protest by my daughter) but Marshmallow Girl....*roll eyes* 

Christmas Decorated Cookies

Finally found some time to bake and decorate cookies for Sunday School kids in Church. :) I received a box of cookie cutters, Christmas present from my dear friend and colleague - MH. These cutters definitely came in handy! :)

Cookie Recipe courtesy of Pam @ cookiecrazie

Royal Icing Recipe courtesy of Marian @ Sweetopia

Both of them have such great talent in cookie decorating! They are really good in what they do..check out their blog and you will be amazed at their creativity and awesome decorating skills. I'm always inspired by them and in awe of their beautiful & perfect work!

Snowflake cookies

I had a great time decorating these snowflakes cookies.

Loved that i can pipe any way i like and cookie still looked good. :)

Christmas Tree cookies

I love piping the little dots on the trees..

Ice-cream cookies

M&Ms as 'topping'

Snowman cookies

I didn't have time to wait for the white icing to dry before i pipe in red scarf.

Didn't help that my husband was nagging at me to finish up every 5 mins! Arggh..

Men, they don't get it, do they?

Cookies all packed and ready to go..:)

Part I - Birthday Venetian Theme

My daughter's 18th birthday is coming and she wants to have a 'Venetian Theme' for her birthday cake. I've designed her cake but too shy to post it up yet..hahahaha..until the end product, ie, the final cake turns out well like my drawing, then i will post it together with the cake...:D

I made these batch of decorated cookies in the shape of mask and fan...cos that's only what i can think of...hahaha..and that's all i saw selling at the shops in Venice when we were there! LOL! So, these mask & fan cookies will be part of the cake. Oh..as for the stars and hearts, i got tired of having to cut the cookies to mask & fan manually (yup..without any cookie cutters), that i took out the star & heart cookie cutters and cut the rest of the dough into the respective shapes!

Decorating cookies is hard work! Just decorating these few cookies took me like 4 hours to decorate and that doesn't include the baking of the cookies or even cutting the cookies into shape etc?! Tiring.. And again, my piping skills sucks! This is my first time doing decorated cookies..so i didn't even know it would be SOOOOOO tedious!

Here are the various photos of the decorated masks...







Here are the fans, stars and hearts..





You can see from the photos that some i didn't pipe well and evenly cos i was getting very tired...and it was like 11+pm and i was still piping....:(

And my daughter piped most of these (see photo below)...esp. the creative ones she did it..not bad i would say! She did the basic template of the mask & fan for me as a guide to manually cut out the cookies. :)