Sweet Me Up: Desserts by miVi

Bubble Bobble cake requested by a friend for someone's 16th birthday.

Although this is a baking blog, allow me to release my inner geek to tell you  Bubble Bobble was one of many happy memories from my childhood. When my friend asked me if I’ve heard of it, I got so excited at the prospect of design a Bubble Bobble themed cake, I accepted without hearing any details.

In fact, let’s all take a trip, shall we? Let’s wiki this thing!

Now, let’s go play it!

Made these about a month (pre-film-release). They’re sugar cookies with Royal Icing. The black marker you see in the pics is an edible food writer marker.

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Ahhh, the popular Hostess Cupcake. Growing up this was alway a special occasion treat because A) we didn’t get a lot of cupcakes as a regular dessert (we were a family that honoured the chocolate chip cookie) and B) we couldn’t justify buying a snack cake if we could just bake it.

So I decided to whip up my own version of this cupcake.

First of all for the cake part, I use my go to chocolate cake recipe. I doubled the recipe to make 48 cupcakes (I have lots of mouths to feed!). Variation to the measurement time: Fill the cupcake wells ¾ of the way so that when they rise, it’ll give you plenty of cupcake top to cut off. Bake the cupcakes for 20 minutes.

When cupcakes are cooled, use a serrated knife to cut the tops off.

Create chocolate ganache: Place 1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chip into a heatproof bowl. Heat ¾ cup of whipping cream until it just starts to boil. Remove from heat and pour over the chocolate. Let chocolate melt and then stir with a whisk until ganache is smooth. Spread ganache on top of the cupcake tops. Refrigerate so the ganache can firm up.

Meanwhile, make the frosting glaze: Mix 1 cup icing sugar with 2 tbsp. milk. Add more sugar to get a pipeable consistency. Put frosting in a pastry bag and pipe a desired design on the ganached cupcake tops.

Create pastry cream: Whip 2 cups of heavy cream with ½ cup of icing sugar until soft peaks form. Dissolve 1 tsp. of gelatin in 1 tbsp. of water over a low heat. Add gelatin mixture to the cream mixture and whip until stiff peaks form. Feel free to add 1 tsp. vanilla to the mixture. Place a generous dollop of cream on top of the cut cupcakes.

Now, take those pretty little cupcake lids and place them on top of the mount of pastry cream like so…

Enjoy!

Chocolate cake with meringue frosting.

And who doesn’t know who this is?

“Me been there. Me have crazy times in 70s and 80s. Me like the Robert Downey Jr. of cookies.”
[There was an embedded YouTube video here but alas, copyright issues claimed by Viacom have struck again! So in light of this issue, here's the link to the clip which legally resides on The Comedy Network player]

Standing mixers. Preheat to 350.
Cream. Blend. Stir. Fold. Mix.
All impressive and mighty nifty,
But here’s a recipe kids can get their kicks.

Packaged cake mix with some milk.
Tiny bowl, little spoon and baby pan.
Stir until batter is smooth as silk.
Bake like Mom? Yes, kids can.

Set the light bulb to ON and watch it glow;
Getting ready to bake up some fun.
In the pan goes, it will not overflow.
The mini oven will ding when it’s done.

Then comes the frosting to sweeten the deal.
No patience for cooling the pint-size cake.
The icing drips slightly, this is hardly a meal.
This is what you get when you Easy-Bake.

– Michelle Villagracia (a.k.a. miVi)

Here’s a happy list of geeky baked goods. Wondering if my ColecoVision Cake is worthy to be among them
[Linky Linky]

Flickr user: katipeck

Also check out her Indiana Jones cupcakes [hearts!]

A few months ago I was asked challenged to make a ColecoVision cake. Here is the result:

(I’m aware the front part is very inaccurate to an actual ColecoVision but hey, I ran out of material)

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Just did a Flickr search on some of my childhood memories in cupcake form…

The Rubiks Cube from Flickr user Anita Jamal

Super Mario Bros. from Flickr user clevercupcakes

Sesame Street from Flickr user EyMie

Daleks from Flickr user Crumbs and Dolies

And finally…

Mahjjong Tiles from Flickr user PinkCakeBox