Snakes, Piggies and Settlers

My friend, K, loves snakes; she's got 3! They're named Lumpy, Lemon and Pumpkin. She also has a cute little yellow gecko who jumps at the sight of her. He still needs to get used to his new home. She also loves these little piggies, they're all over her house, in a subtle way though. So for her birthday I decided to combine the two. What do you think?

I know it looks a little sad, poor little piggy, but no animals were injured in the making of this cake =)

She didn't actually receive it on her birthday though. Oh she's a sneaky one! I had the impression that she would be busy that entire weekend. I decided to surprise her even if it was a few weeks late.

I didn't make it very big as it was a surprise cake I didn't know if there would be many people around to help her eat it. I would've liked to have made it out of sponge cake but for something this small, I was afraid it would end up as crumbs wrapped up in fondant.

I used a simple rice cereal treats recipe that you can find on the cereal box and some pre-coloured fondant. Rice treats and fondant are great for holding their shape.

You know how when you make rice cereal treats and when they're still warm, they're wonderfully soft and gooey and delicious? Then the next day they're hard as rocks = /. When you buy them pre-made they're always soft! How do they do that??? So I looked it up and the secret is, not to let everything melt all the way. Just let, say, 80% of it melt. What do I mean? Check it out.

So get all your ingredients, measured and ready to go before you start cooking. (This is called mise en place, meaning everything in it's place in French. I love this saying, one, because it's French, two, because it reminds of chemistry and makes me feel better that my life science schooling has use and three, because it's so neat and organized! =D)

Step one: Melt your butter in a pot. I tried to get some of the butter up on the sides of the pot as well so it wouldn't stick as much. Then add the marshmallows.

Step two: Melt your marshmellows in the pot and add your cereal, any cereal really, but rice cereal is the best.

Step 3: Place your mixture on a greased pan or one with wax paper to let it cool. You can shape it a bit but DON'T PRESS DOWN! Then ta da, perfectly soft gooey cereal treats. Yum Yum.

 Remember to be quick, before everything starts to harden or stick to the pan, like this:                 

 

But if it does, don't worry too much about it, cause then you get to do this (Yummy).

To make the bodies of the snake and piggies, I ripped off pieces of the cereal treats and just shaped them with my hands. The wax paper is there to keep the treats from sticking to each other.

Then I covered the treats in buttercream so the fondant would stick to it and rolled out my fondant. Make sure your surface and rolling pin are floured or greased so that the fondant doesn't stick to it.

I mixed the pre-coloured fondant and rolled it out into a strip:

Let me tell you, sculpting cake is not easy, wrapping sculpted cake in fondant is even harder!. The picture you see above was version 3. 

Here's version 1:

Ugh! I had a hard time mixing the colours to get the right kind of orange, it kept looking like a skin colour. And I didn't shape the treats nice enough so it turned out really lumpy. In the end, it turned out looking like intestines to me. I just couldn't continue so I stripped it.

Here's version 2:

This one wasn't bad except that I didn't roll enough fondant out and as a result, he had a lot of scars from my patch jobs.

He still looked quite skin coloured to me so I used some food colouring to brighten up the orange and add his pattern on. It didn't turn out well, you can see where I start to run out of colouring and patience. -.-;

I was about to present this to K. I guess I was dreaming about it all night cause I managed to get up at 7 the morning I was going to see her to mix the fondant again to get the right colour and fix the paint job and make the snake look a little less cartoony and more realistic. Here are some more pictures of version 3:

I used pieces of fondant this time to put his pattern on, and darkened it with food colouring.

Here are some close up of the piggies, which were fine and reused for version 3:

As you might have noticed, they're dressed like that cause K and bdon are engaged.

Here's another "cake" I made for my dear F's birthday. We had a phase, after we discovered settlers, where that was all we would play, every weekend, to the wee hours of the morning. I know if you haven't played it before it sounds super nerdy but after you learn how to play, it can get very cut throat and very addictive.

For this cake I used cookies, icing and fondant for the game pieces. This version wasn't that great but I was aiming to make a board that you could actually play on. This is much better than the one I made the year before though...

That was with home made fondant too, which is extremely messy to make. This one was not at all playable but it was my first time making a cake like this and using fondant.

Next year it will definitely be playable. It'll be perfect dammit!

Sidenote: After doing a Google search for cookies and getting an unexpected result, I've starting searching for the title of my blogs to see if anything interesting comes up. Check this one out, it was the first result I got that had all of the above: snakes, pigs and settlers. Hah!

Oh Thanks to my new followers, Cedric and Melinh =)