A Mad Hatter Tea Party (and Mad Hatter Cake #3)

Oh dear, here is one cake that I didn't get around to share with you all from last May - A Mad Hatter Hat Cake with a modeling chocolate figurine of the birthday girl.

A chocolate cake filled with strawberry Italian Meringue Buttercream
and covered in Chocolate Ganache dusted in green, brown and gold dust

Last May we made the 6 hour drive to San Jose to spend Easter with my cousin and to also help with her daughter's 10th birthday party.  It was the most amazing Mad Hatter Tea Party.

the girls huddled in front of the cake while eating some treats =)

This was the 3rd Mad Hatter Hat Cake that I've made and if you would like to see them, check out my previous blog posts here:

Mad Hatter Cake #1

Mad Hatter Cake #2

We also made a bunch of decorations to top the cupcakes with...
- Stacked teacups which I later filled with chocolate ganache
- Mad Hatter Hats with her birthdate
- Clocks with her birth time
- Eat-Me tags
- Ribbon Roses
- Clubs, Clovers, Hearts and Spades
- and butterflies

The chocolate cupcakes were frosted with a swirl of purple and pink Italian Meringue Buttercream and topped with an assortment of decorations.


We also made cake pops and skewers of fruit and placed them in tall vases stuffed with colorful tissue paper.

My cousin did an awesome job with the table setting:  A couple unique tea pots and a different teacup for each setting - not one of them looked like another...it was perfect for the theme.  She also found some really colorful and bold plates, cups, napkins and little trinkets to make for a super colorful and perfect tea party.  I went overboard tying a bow onto anything that could hold a bow (I loved the red/black/white printed ribbon) - it's even up around the windows and wall decor too =)

She even setup a table for the little ones.

And the doily lace trimming around the cake stand is a paper border that my cousin had bought a while back.  It came precut and folded up inside a little packet by Martha Stewart.  I attached it to the side of the cake stand with some double sided tape.  I loved how it dressed up the stand - so simple too.


We had all hands were on deck from family and friends in putting this together and it turned out quite lovely.  An incredibly beautiful birthday for an incredibly beautiful girl.

Lalaloopsy Cake & Dessert Table - Toffee Cocoa Cuddles

My daughter's 5th birthday cake - she is crazy about all things Lalaloopsy with her most favorite doll being Toffee Cocoa Cuddles.  I think the dolls are a little weird with their huge plastic heads and tiny bodies but they do have cute names and stories of what they're made of behind each one of them.  Such as Crumbs Sugar Cookie (made from pieces of a baking apron), Spot Splatter Splash (sewn from a painter's coveralls) and Ember Flicker Flame (made from a fire fighter's uniform).

As for her favorite one, Toffee Cocoa Cuddles is "sewn" from pieces off a chocolate box and likes to give hugs and all things sweet.  Plus, she has a chocolate lab that has a piece bitten off his ear - how cute is that!  

If you're looking for some really cute Lalaloopsy invitations, check out Lala Heaven's store on etsy.  You give her your info, she sends you the digital file and you print them on your own printer and paper - convenient, inexpensive and oh sew cute!

I wanted to create a table setting for "Caitlyn's Sweet Shop"with lots of sweet treats for the party guests to enjoy - something I had never done before and with seeing so many pretty dessert table setups over the Internet, I really wanted to give one a try.  But boy!  After all the prepping and getting things together, I ran out of time and didn't get all I envisioned made and on it.

A Lalaloopsy inspired dessert table

My 8 year old son helped make the banner on the wall out of foam cutouts found at a dollar store.
Button Plates were inspired by Pinterest:
Lalaloopsy Party Button Backdrop on Hostess with the Mostess

another Pinterest find:  Fabric Flowers by Bete Bazzi on flickr
I bought an assortment of fabric and cutout circles using a play dough lid as a template =).  Stitched up some buttons for the centers, glued a 1/2 inch felt circle to the back and sewed hair ties to them.
I then tied them up in pairs and put them in a heart shaped bowl for the girls to pick from for their goody bags.  These turned out so cute.

Chocolate Cake Pops
I also made the button monogram in the background and hope to hang it up in her room soon...once I find the bag of picture hangers in the garage somewhere =)

Some candy jars...I printed out images of the dolls off the Internet, cut them out using zig zag scissors and attached them onto a glass jar wrapped in ribbon.

more candy jars.... I also had a jar with clear bags and ties for the guests to fill their own goody bags to take some sweet treats home with them.

I love the Candy Topiary inspired again, by Pinterest:
Take a foam ball, stick Dum Dum lollipops into it (it took an entire large, 180pc bag of Dum Dums) and stand it up on either a candle stick or like I did, stick a dowel wrapped in ribbon into it and stand it into a flower pot.  The ball is really heavy so I stuffed a bunch of heavy stuff into the vase to support it (there are a couple bags filled with rice, a foam block to help hold it up straight and a roll of this heavy, industrial tape I found in my hubbies tool box - pretty much anything that would fit and support the heavy ball and keep it from toppling over)

a game for the kids - Guess the number of M and M's in the jar.
Winner got to take the jar home....Congrat's Ally!  That's Crumbs Sugar Cookies little sister (Sprinkle Spice Cookie) on the label and she has a smudge of chocolate on here face - lol!

and some mini Chocolate Cupcakes topped with Raspberry Italian Meringue Buttercream

and one of my most favorite treats, Lalaloopsy Cake Pop Favors

I made the tags in photoshop, zig zag scissors to cut them to size and then punched holes in 2 corners to slide the popsicle stick up through.

For the cakes design, I pulled some features off the doll's outfit - such as the stripes along the side of the cake matched her sleeves and the loops below the stripes matched the loop design on one of the layers of the skirt.  My daughter specifically asked for hearts along the cake so I did the top trim in hearts and they actually turned out really cute that way.  I was also inspired by JessiCakes design and used her technique with the stripes as shown here on her blog:  Maddie's Fashion Birthday Cake by JessiCakes.

Her head is made out of a cake pop and the body is decorated in gumpaste and MMF.
It was 4am by the time I finished her up and I had to leave the polka dots off her dress to sneak a couple hours of sleep before having to get the entire house in order and lalaloopsy cake pop favors made - yeah, talk about last minute.

before being wrapped up into favors

To see how the figurine and the Lalaloopsy Cake Pops were made, take a look at my 1st Lalaloopsy Cake post found here:  Blossom Flower Pots Lalaloopsy Cake and Cake Pops

and to the best part...getting to cut and eat the cake
(no worries - I was standing right beside her keeping a close eye on her)

Cake is covered and decorated in MMF
Momofuku Milk Bar Cake filled instead with Raspberry Meringue Buttercream
8 inch round (6 inches tall)

All in all, her party turned out oh, sew sweet =)

Lalaloopsy Cake & Cake Pops

Where have I been?  It's been a long while since I last posted anything but I've been so busy and have been staying away from cake stuff for the past couple of months to just get caught up with life and everything going on with it.  At least for now, I'm back and I've been missing it for way too long.

Do you know a Lalaloopsy?  Hah-hah, I have gotten to know these dolls really well over the past few weeks.  They are everywhere and all the little girls are talking about them and collecting the dolls!  Even my 4 year old has a long list of the ones she wants!

This cake was made for my 9 year old niece Kayla who had a garden themed Lalaloopsy party this past Sunday.  And she has over a dozen of them in her collection.  It was so cute seeing her name each of the cake pops and getting excited with each one =)

I must admit, these little gals, after all the trouble I ran into creating them, turned out super cute =)

I've never been a big fan of cake pops.  They're mashed up cake that is just too sweet with the chocolate coating for my taste but the kids go crazy over them and they never last long at any party.  So, determined to make a cake pop that I could enjoy eating too, I bought the Nordic Ware Cake Pops Pan.  LOVE IT!  I want go buy a few more of these.  One pan is not enough.

And, one of my gifts from my cousin and her husband (they just got married a little over a week ago), were 2 sets of the Silicone Cake Pop Trays.  They didn't work that great (sorry Steph and Sean) but I'm gonna give them another try with other recipes before I give up on them - And, I'll be sharing with you all about their wonderful wedding and the cake I made for them really soon too.

I tried using a scratch chocolate cake recipe to make the balls but the batter doesn't rise much and I ended up with ovals that we gobbled up right off the pan as they were cooling - it was too easy to just pop one of these things in your mouth...and another...and yet another...well, they didn't last long.

(I also had made some banana bread and had a little bit of batter left over from the loaf pan and made some cake balls with them and wow, those were gone fast!)

So, for the Cake Pops, I made them using a box mix, sub milk for water, and add an extra egg - read it on a couple places on the web that suggested it with using cake ball pans.  The result....

Chocolate cake baked in the cake pop pans - metal pan (right) and silicone tray (left)

These were baked in the Silicone Cake Ball Tray - the middle of the cakes grew pushing the tray up in the middle which resulted in a thick ring of cake around the edges.  They didn't do so well when I tried to dip them since they weren't firm and had too many air pockets on the top half of the spheres.

These were baked in the Nordic Ware Cake Ball pan.  Much, much better.  The metal pans are tightly clamped so there wasn't much excess around the middle - just a thin bit that I trimmed off with a pair of kitchen shears.  The balls were really nice, firm, smooth and round.  So much better and easier to dip into the chocolate with too.

But my troubles didn't end there.  Dipping cake into chocolate was a disaster at first.  I just couldn't get the Wilton Candy Melts to work right so I ended up using Vanilla Almond Bark with a little bit of Americolor Soft Gel Paste in a Copper Flesh Tone Color added to it to make them look closer to the same color as the dolls.

Then, on top of that, the cake just wouldn't stay on the stick when I tried to dip it into the chocolate.  The weight of the chocolate just tore the soft cake right off the stick!  The cakes were chilled cold but it didn't matter.  So basically, I had to dip the cake ball into the chocolate and let it sit still while I spooned the chocolate up and around the pop and with the same spoon, I scooped the pop straight up to lightly twirl and tap off the excess on the side of the bowl.  I then let them sit over a piece of parchment paper using an egg carton to hold the sticks up at an angle.

Originally I wanted the sticks to be on the bottom of the cake pop so that I could stick them into a block but the cake just wouldn't sit straight and it just wanted to break and fall apart - errrr!  Frustration upon frustration but with a little improvising, they actually turned out cute laying off to the side.  I am not a cake ball/pop maker and I bow down to you all that make these often.  With some practice, just maybe, I'll get it down right.

And to the decorating part.  I tried making the doll hair by piping chocolate but it just didn't look right.  I wanted their hair to look like THEIR hair as close as possible.  So I tried to pipe royal icing in layers but that was worse so, in the end, I tossed out the piping bags (I don't like piping much anyways) and pulled out the MMF and did what I was most comfortable with...decorating with fondant.  I love how they turned out!  Although each doll took an average of 20 minutes to decorate, it was worth it in the end.

Spot Splatter Splash Lalaloopsy

How to:  Roll out the MMF into a long rope, slice it up in varying lengths, lightly score each piece a couple times then with piping gel, glue them onto the cake pop.  Piping gel sticks really well to chocolate - water won't work.  

Pillow Featherbed Lalaloopsy

Use a round piping tip to make the eye balls - a larger one to cut out the circle and a slightly smaller one to make the impression inside.  Then with a toothpick or a thin tool, cut out the holes inside the button.  I also used the round piping tip to cut out the cheeks with and painted the mouth and lashes with a really thin paint brush with black AmeriColor Gel.

Crumbs Sugar Cookie and Mittens Fluff 'n' Stuff Lalaloopsy's

The assortment:  Their names from front left to right: Spot Splatter Splash, Jewel Sparkles, Pillow Featherbed, Dot Starlight, Mittens Fluff 'n' Stuff, Crumbs Sugar Cookie, and Bea Spells-a-Lot
(they were each tied up with pink ribbon later)

By the time I finished decorating and bagging the 20 cake pops, it was 4:00 a.m. and I still had the cake to cover and decorate.  So, this is the only photo I remembered to take but at least it shows you the basic structure of the cake topper.

There's a Popsicle stick inserted into the cake ball then over that is a thick boba straw that ran the entire height of the cake and right up to the bottom of her head to help support and hold her up.

The head of the topper is mashed up cake and about 1-3/4 inches across.  It was then covered over in a 50/50 mix of modeling chocolate and MMF.  Her clothing was built in layers of ruffles with gumpaste since by the time I started making her, the sun had already come up, the birds were chirping outside and the party was about to start in a few hours - I needed it to dry fast.

And here she is all completed...

Blossom Flowerpots Lalaloopsy

Note her toes...all the dolls toes touch so I had to make her toes touch too =)

And the trees are stuffed with marshmallows to make them look puffy.

I also incorporated her name into the label - hah-hah!  My daughter now wants the same theme for her 5th birthday next month (there goes the girlie pirate theme out the door).  But, I'm looking forward to making these again.

And I did get some sleep that morning...all 2 hours worth =)  My sister-in-law did make me one of her delicious cups of coffee that helped me get through the day.  The things we go through to make cake I tell ya!  But seeing the joy in the kids faces and their eyes light up is so worth it.

See another Lalaloopsy Themed Cake here:
Lalaloopsy Cake and Dessert Table (Toffee Cocoa Cuddles)