The Octopus Cake

For my daughter's 1st birthday, I made her an octopus cake. That was her nickname for the first half of her life. I saw Pink Cake Box's and thought it was perfect for my little munchkin. I tweeked it a little. This was my first time carving cake. My (a LOT more artistic) dad helped me. The cake and octopus are covered in fondant. All the decorations are fondant and gumpaste. I had a difficult time getting the gumpaste to the right consistency. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to make it firm enough to work with, but moist enough so it doesn't crack?

Before the bow was attached. The base was white cake with raspberry buttercream and the octopus is white cake with pistachio buttercream:


The finished cake:

(I also made these again- how does she get them to look so good?)

Treats

My in-laws (all 20 of them) came in town this weekend for a week. I decided to make treats for them for when they got here today. I made sugar cookies from Confetti Cakes. I noticed something was a little off when the book said over four cups of flour for 2/3 c sugar and not much butter, but I thought hey, that's what the book says. When all I got was a crumbly mess, I ran upstairs to look online. That's when I saw that there is a misprint in the book- there should only be 2 2/3c flour. Not cool. Good thing the yummy buttercream was so yummy I was willing to forgive. Well, I did some whole milk and sugar fixes and they came out ok- a little dry, but still buttery. Not my favorite type of sugar cookie; I prefer the thick, soft chewy kind, but these held up better with the royal icing and flooding.
I also made these cupcake bites. Bakerella makes it look much easier than it is. What I thought was the right kind of cookie cutter wasn't, so I ended up molding them into cupcake shapes by hand (Beansy thought they were mushrooms). It was all quite time consuming so needless to say, I'm going to find the correct cookie cutter for next time. I can't give up on these, they're just too cute!