When Cheating is Right

After weeks of planning a bash for my son's first birthday, I submitted and decided to accept a little help from some old pals. Among these pals were Betty Crocker, Duff Goldman, and a few others.

When my guestlist nearly doubled, plans of making a cake and edible party favors from scratch suddenly seemed a little too ambitious. Don't get me wrong, in the end I still put in my fair share of labor, but with products that I discovered at the craftstore and supermarket, my work load was significantly reduced, and the outcome was pretty impressive, if I do say so myself.

I did make the cake, but I guess you could say I cheated since it ended up looking pretty darn professional with the help of store-bought fondant and Duff Goldman's new line of cake decorating stuff. (In case you don't know who Duff Goldman is, he's a celebrity chef baker and star of foodnetwork's Ace of Cakes, a show that's as addictive to expert bakers as it is to people who don't know what a whisk is).

So among the really cool products that the line offers are cake tattoes. Yep, they're exactly what they sound like - edible paper strips that come in a multitude of prints, and are literally tattooed onto your cake! It was super easy. The hardest part of my whole cake venture was probably getting the fondant onto the cake. Next time I think I'll just use frosting to cover the cake, since you achieve the same look by applying the tattoos to a frosted cake.

Check out Duff's stuff:
http://www.duff.com/projects/edible-cake-tattoo

Here is what I ended up with...

For the party favors, I was intent on making cake pops (cake on a stick). But because of the large quanitity of favors I needed to make, I decided to at least fly through the baking process by using cake mix from the box and frosting from the can (don't judge me!). For an instructional, I turned to the queen of cake pops herself, Bakerella. With a few tweaks and special touches on my part, I emerged with favors that were as chic as they were cute and delicious.                                                                 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpIifr0VOxY  

             

I decided to use melted frosting to coat the cake pops instead of the candy melts that Bakerella uses. After coating them with melted frosting, I dredged the pops in sprinkles, and stuck them into a styrofoam box so that they could set in an upright position. Once they were set, I laid them out on a parchment paper covered tray and stuck them in the freezer to ensure that they were really set. I then put the pops in clear favor bags and wrapped them with ribbon. Once the pops were all cute as heck, they went back into the freezer, and waited patiently till the day of the party.
The final verdict - great success, among the kids and the adults!