Happy Easter everybody!

Today we have a guest blog post by the very talented Ashley Verhagen. She shows us how to make her precious Easter Bunny cake:

What’s more fun than sweet little bunnies lounging near Easter eggs? Perhaps they’re all dreaming of the lovely Easter candy to be had soon? Let’s learn how to reproduce this cake, shall we?

Supply List:

Cake: 9” round iced in yellow, 6” round iced in white
Skewers
½ ” Foam-core board, cut in a circle with a 14” diameter, covered with wrapping paper of your color choice and food safe cellophane
Icing
Piping bags
Tip 5, 104, 233
Various round tips
Fondant tinted in your desired colors
Gel colors (pink, lime green, purple, yellow)
Exacto knife
Clay extruder
Gum Glue
Paint brush
Dresden Tool
Toothpicks
Small Daisy gumpaste cutter
Small rolling pin
Floral Wire
Plastic Wrap
One larger and two smaller styrofoam egg shapes
FMM ribbon cutter
Edible glitter
Shortening
Decorative ribbon to match your cake
Styrofoam Dummy
Hot glue gun

After you’ve assembled all of your tools and supplies, it’s time to decorate your cake board. Take your ½ ” foam core board and rest it on your counter top. Roll out a small fist sized ball of pink fondant thinly (I like to do this ON the board). Using your exacto knife, trim the fondant in an undulating pattern around the edge of the cake board. Then, using the fondant extruder and a small round disk, extrude a band of hot pink fondant and attach it to the undulating edge with gum glue. Tip: to make the fondant easier to extrude, knead some shortening into it.

Now that we’ve got the housekeeping out of the way, it’s on to the fun part… the cake! Take your 9” yellow round and transfer it carefully to your board.   Dowel, then stack the 6” white on top of this centered evenly. Take your piping bag fitted with the 104 tip and fill it with yellow icing. Beginning at the back of the cake, begin to pipe the border. The technique to make the border is basically the same as that of piping rose petals… just repeated across the bottom edge of the cake. Do this for the base of both cakes. Now, fill a piping bag with white icing and fit it with a 5 tip. At the top of the petal border, add small dots of icing. Tip: For a polished look, go back with a finger dipped in powdered sugar and touch the top of each dot lightly to knock down any icing tips that may have formed.

Let’s make flowers, y’all! Rub a small amount of shortening on your work surface to ensure the fondant doesn’t stick. Roll a small ball of white fondant thinly. Using your flower cutter, cut several blossoms and set them aside to air dry for a few moments. Take a good bit of your plastic wrap and bunch it up tightly, then open it back up a bit. Shape is not important, we’re just using it as a flower former. Using your Dresden tool (or a toothpick), draw a line down each daisy petal. Roll a small ball of yellow fondant and attach it with gum glue into the center of the flower. Lay it carefully to dry somewhere in a crevice of the plastic wrap.

It’s on to the eggs now! Take your egg and rub it with a bit of shortening so that the fondant adheres well. Roll out each base color of fondant to less than ¼” thickness. Lay the fondant over each egg, working it down the sides. Don’t pull the fondant, just guide it down the sides. If you end up with too much excess fondant along the bottom, trim it away with your exacto knife. Since covering round 3D shapes with fondant is tricky, you might have to use scissors to trim away some of the side excess as well. When trimming with scissors, try to get close to the edge of the egg. Continue smoothing your fondant over the egg until it is all covered and trimmed.

To make the bows for each egg, roll out and cut 4 strips of fondant in your desired width and several inches long. Using two of the strips, cut your bow tails into the desired length. Notch the ends of one side of the bow tails with your exacto knife, then pinch the opposite side. With the remaining two lengths, cut each one to 1 ¼” long. Pinch each side of each strip, then fold the strip lengthwise, bringing the pinched ends together. You’ve got your bow loops. Set them aside to dry for a few minutes while you decorate your eggs. If you find they’re getting too ‘set’, put them under plastic wrap as they still need to be somewhat elastic.

Using your FMM ribbon cutter and your various round tips, decorate each egg with stripes and/or dots. To attach them, use a small it of gum glue and your paintbrush. Vary up your design and be creative! Use different sizes of round tips to get smaller or larger circles. Use the straight ribbons or the wavy… or even the ones with stitching. Carefully attach each bow tail and bow loop to your egg using small dabs of icing. For the center, slightly flatten a small ball of fondant and attach it to the center using icing or gum glue. There’s no right or wrong way to decorates these cuties!

Now, let’s move on to the bunnies, shall we? They’re actually really easy to do, as long as you can master some basic figure modeling techniques. Most of the techniques used involve forming fondant into ball shapes, then tapering one end of the ball shape into a carrot shape. I do most of my modeling on a styrofoam dummy since I can stick my skewer into the dummy and hold the figure still as I model it.

Let’s start with the yellow bunny for the cake topper. The instructions will be mostly the same for each bunny, with possibly a few exceptions in the way we pose them. Take a small bit of yellow fondant and form it into a 2” round ball by rolling it around in your hands. After you’ve formed the ball, taper one end of the ball by rubbing your hands back and forth along one end of the ball. This will be the body of the rabbit. You’ll want to flatten it a bit so it doesn’t look like a fat little bunny. At this point, stick a toothpick through the body of the rabbit, leaving approximately 1” protruding through the tapered end. This is where we’ll attach the head in a few moments.

For the rabbit’s appendages, you need to shape small balls of fondant into carrot shapes. At the rounded ends of the carrot, you can pinch around the edges to flatten it a bit. Make four of these roughly the same sizes. For each arm, roll a small ball of white fondant, then flatten it out into a small circle. Use gum glue to attach the white circle to the rounded end to make the ‘hands’. For each foot, form three teeny pieces of fondant into round balls, flatten them slightly, then attach them with gum glue to the rounded end to make the ‘feet’. Attach the arms and legs to the main body using gum glue. For the arms, it’s sometimes helpful to flatten the tapered end a bit so you don’t have a lot of bulk at the shoulder   Don’t forget to give them some personality when you position them!

For the rabbit’s head, roll a small ball about ½” in diameter into a ball. Taper one end very slightly to almost get a rounded triangle shape. Stick it on the toothpick protruding from body and attach it with gum glue.   For the ears, take two ¼” balls of fondant and form them into a carrot shape. Slightly flatten each carrot shape along then entire length of the piece. Take a 1” piece of floral wire, brush it with gum glue, and insert it about halfway into each ear. Stick each wire onto either side of your tapered head and attach it with gum glue. You can position the tips of your ears so one is sticking up and one is curling over. For the cheeks, take two small balls of white fondant and flatten them slightly. Attach them to the face using gum glue near the middle of the face. Use a toothpick to poke small holes in them to simulate puffy cheeks. For the nose, take a very small ball of pink fondant and attach it using gum glue above the cheeks. Use your toothpick to poke small holes for the eyes. You can also use your exacto knife to make eyebrows and eyelashes.

For the pink and purple bunnies, form them roughly the same as you did the yellow one with a few exceptions. Instead of using a toothpick for the body support on the pink bunny, use a skewer cut to approx. 7” long. An easy way to do this is to poke a hole in your dummy and insert your skewer all the way through. Make sure it’s loose enough so you can pull it out easily as you will remove it later. When you insert the body into the skewer, leave approx. 1” of it poking out of the tapered end. If you end up making a larger body and there’s not enough room for the 1” of clearance, you can always insert a toothpick into the body, as well, to hold the head on. Continue making your pink bunny in the same method as the you used with the yellow bunny. For the purple bunny, form it in the same manner as you did the yellow bunny using a toothpick. Since it’s resting on the cake board, it doesn’t need the long skewer. You may simply use a toothpick to hold the body and head together.

For the cute little chicks, take a small amount of yellow fondant and form it into a ball. Taper one end very slightly into a rounded triangle as you did for the rabbit’s head. Take two very small pieces of yellow fondant and form them into a carrot shape. At the tapered end, flatten it slightly. Attach the wings with gum glue to the body with the tapered end towards the top and the rounded end pointing down. Take a teeny bit of orange (or pink) fondant and form a small, small carrot for the beak. Attach it with gum glue. Use your toothpick to punch holes for the eyes. Voila! Cute baby chicks.

Now that everything has been made, let’s assemble our decorations on the cake. Fit a piping bag with a tip 233 and fill it with lime green icing. Oh the top tier of your cake, pipe a small circle of grass a bit wider than the largest egg. Take the large egg and place it on the top tier. You might want to anchor it with a skewer for support. Take the yellow bunny and attach him to the cake using a bit of icing, as well. You can choose to stick a small toothpick into the cake and into the underbelly of the bunny if you’d like to further anchor the bunny to the cake. Use a small dab of icing to attach one of the small daises and one chick next to the bunny.

Use the green icing bag to also pipe grass on top of the bottom tier where you’d like to place one of the smaller eggs and the pink bunny. Place the egg in the grass, then take the pink bunny skewer off the dummy carefully and stick it into the cake, as well. Use a small bit of white icing to attach several flowers and a chick around the pink bunny and small egg.

Pipe green grass in a circle shape on the cake board, then place the egg in the grass. Place the purple bunny near the last egg, anchoring it with a small bit of icing. Attach the last chick to the bunny’s tummy with icing. Scatter the remaining daisies around the cake, using icing to attach them.

If you’d like, you can hot glue coordinating ribbon around the ½” cake board lip to complete your cake. Sprinkle the cake with edible glitter for a little sparkle.

You’re done! So simple!

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Ashley has enjoyed being in the kitchen from an early age, especially baking with her mother and grandmother. She’d always been intrigued by beautiful cakes, and took her first leap into the world of cake decorating 13 years ago. Currently, she lives in Frisco, Texas with her husband and four lovely daughters.  Pictures of her work can be found on her Flickr photo stream.

The Easter Bunny Is Coming!

But before he can make his rounds, he has all his helpers searching for his missing carrots.  And that leaves us to view the cutest little bunny butts ever.

 And if you would like to make some of these adorable cupcakes; here is the how to:

Give your cupcake a crumb coat of green buttercream and then cover the entire surface with short grass using a tip 233.

Use a round scoop to form half balls with white fondant, and place them down into the grass.

Cut a circle of fondant and then cut two ear shapes off the sides of the circle with the same cutter. Stick them into the grass and bend them forward at the tips just a bit.

Attach a small ball of white fondant with water to make the tail. Poke it a bunch of times with a veining tool or pointy end of a small paintbrush to give it the bushy texture.

That is all there is to it!  Now all you have to do is watch your guests squeal in delight when they see these cuties.

You can make these quickly with things you probably already have on hand at home. So if you procrastinate (like I do), and need a cute treat to whip up fast, these are a great option.

SugarEd wishes  our readers who celebrate Easter a most blessed and joyous day. And for those that do not, we wish you a happy and healthy Spring.

Sweet Regards,

Sharon

 Happy Spring Everyone!

Things are starting to turn green and warm up. Easter is right around the corner. In the spirit of the season I would like to share with you how I made this cute blossom bunny cake.

First, let me share with you my inspiration. I was shopping  for groceries and as soon as I walked into the store, before me stood the floral department. And right smack in the middle was this paper craft bunny covered with blossoms. It was very striking and pretty, and my immediate thought was “CAKE!”.  I did not have my phone with me, so I drove back home, got it, and clicked this photo of it to use as a reference. (Ah, the things we do for the love of cake.)

This cell phone photo does not do it justice.

So next I went on the hunt for the right cake pan. This is the one I decided to use, as I liked its shape the most. It is the Wilton 3D bunny pan:

Unfortunately this pan is no longer made, but I saw several for sale on Ebay and Amazon, and a few other sites. So you should be able to get one if you like.

I baked up my cake in the pan, and  it came out really nice. The crust was brown but not overly thick. The center cooked well and the cake was moist. I was very pleased with the performance of the pan. (Sometimes you never know how those 3D pans are going to work.)

Now, I really had my heart set on my bunny having his ears coming straight off the top of his head. I chose this pan because it looked like it should be pretty easy to re-arrange them. (You guys know me; I can’t leave well enough alone.)

In this photo you can see I just cut off his ears in one large piece following the line of his back.

 Next I cut the ears into two pieces right down the middle.

They were then too big to sit side by side on the top of his head, so I had to trim them down. I just followed the curve along the sides of the ears made by the pan.

 Cut a little bevel off the bottom edge and cut them a little shorter too.

I also trimmed along the curve on the other side of the ear as well. I did the same with both ears.

 A skewer put deep into both the ear and the cake will hold them firmly in place.

If you noticed, we gave our poor bunny a lobotomy, so we have to restore the posterior occipital region of his cerebrum and cranium. *I like to use my medical terms once in a while so I don’t get rusty 🙂

 A cupcake made with extra batter is the perfect remedy for what ails our bunny.

Just smoosh up the cupcake really tightly (similar to cake ball mixture) and stick it to the back of his head with some buttercream. You will notice I also softened up the curve of his back just a bit where I had lopped off his ears.

 A nice little crumb coat smoothed with some Viva and our plastic surgery is done.

 Now it’s time to stick his ears back in. He was very happy to be able to hear again.

I also beveled the sharp corners of his ears as well to give them a more rounded and natural shape.

Here is a profile pic. See how nice his shape is?  I have to admit I was pretty tickled with how  it came out. I really had no idea what I was doing, and just winging it as I went along. (I do that a lot, LOL)

So the rest is really easy but very time consuming. Use your favorite blossom cutter and make 80 bamillion blossoms. Lay them on a soft sponge and press the middle with a fat tip of a paintbrush to make them curl up. (*Please don’t look at my funky cel pad. It is weary from wear.)

Thin your buttercream with water and paint on the bunny in small sections, applying the blossoms while still wet.  After you place a bunch of blossoms on, push in the middles again with your paintbrush handle to make them bunch up a bit.

Get your coffee pot brewing, turn on the TV to your favorite show, and plan to spend the next large portion of your life making and applying blossoms. Please don’t  curse me while you are doing this. But I promise the end result will be well worth it!

Use balls of fondant to make his eyes and nose.

You may not be able to tell in the photo, but I sprayed the whole cake with pearl shimmer after it was done. (Cover the eyes while you do this.) It really just made the cake  come to life and added that soft finishing touch it needed.

And don’t forget the bow.

I hope you give this a try. You are sure to get some serious oohs and aahs when you present this beauty. Please send me photos if you do!

Happy Caking!

Sharon

The basket handle was made about 5 days ahead of time. I used half chocolate and half white fondant, adding a very liberal amount of powdered tylose. I formed two thick sausages, then twisted them together, and curved them into the shape I needed for the handle. Make a wire handle that custom fits your cake in width and height, and use that as a guide to form the shape of your fondant handle. Insert sucker sticks into the two ends of the handle. I put it on a cooling rack so the air could get to the under side to aid drying. I have done this many times with success, but I think next time I might try 50/50 gumpaste. More on that later.

Now to make the chocolate eggs. I like Merkens brand super white candy melts. I used candy colors to tint it a few pastel shades. I used a large 3D egg chocolate mold to form the eggs. The molds are clipped together with strong office clamps, and the chocolate is poured into a hole cut out on the underside of the mold. The mold was put in a small cup to hold it straight and put in the freezer for about 15 minutes. Then the mold was removed from the cup and placed back in the freezer, allowing the cold air to fully reach all sides of it. It was ready to be unmolded at about 20-25 minutes total freezing time.

Here are some eggs fresh out of the molds. Oh no!! Look at those ugly seems! What shall we do?? No worries, we can clean that up easily.

Here they are all cleaned up. Use your palette knife or exacto knife to scrape off all the excess. Then use the heat of your gloved hand to smooth and buff out any lines and imperfections. This will cause the egg to lose its shine from the mold, but I have never seen a super shiny dyed Easter egg anyway. We are going for realism here!

However, we do want just a little bit of sheen to bring our eggs up a notch in elegance and refinement. So I used the edible lacquer spray an gave them 2 or 3 thin coats, allowing them to dry in between coats.

Here are the eggs right after spraying. Once dry, they will not be nearly this shiny.

Then the fun part of decorating the eggs! I used a variety of pastel colored fondant, strip, circle and flower cutters to decorate them in a variety of designs. You can use water, piping gel, or shortening as the glue for your fondant trims.

Aren’t they pretty? Try to get your fondant thin, as thick bulky appliques do not looks a nice on the eggs. Now back to the basket….. ( after a fountain Diet Coke run, of course.)

Ahhhhh, now that we are all refreshed, it is time to carve the cake into a slightly tapered basket shape. I have three 2 inch layers of cake here with one layer of filling. The cakes are 12 inch diameter. If you need to see the detailed method for carving this shape, you can check out our Tosy Turvy DVD.

Once the cake was carved, I used the thickened ganache method (also shown in the Topsy Turvy DVD) to coat our cake. Here it is shown all nice and smoothed. The top edge of excess ganache is removed the next day after the ganache has set up to a nice firm shell.

I used the PME basketweave roller to make the basketweave impression. I. love. this. roller. The end.

Measure how tall you want your piece of fondant to be and cut a strip that exact height, and roll it up bandage style.

I smeared shortening all over the ganached cake (with a gloved hand) in a light coat for glue. Shortening is excellent glue. Then I started at the back of my cake, and unrolled the wrap as I went around the cake. (I was taking my own photos, so I had to step away from the cake to take the picture.)

Do not pull or stretch it as you unroll. Just gently unroll it as you smooth it onto the cake with your hand. You do not want to erase or distort the basketweave pattern.

I used a clay gun to make a rope border for both the top edge and the bottom of the basket. Here you can see two large bubble tea straws inserted into the cake where the sucker sticks at the base of the handle will go.

I filled the straws with melted chocolate using a piping bag.

Then the sucker sticks were inserted into the straws . I propped the handle in place with a roll of Viva until the chocolate set.

I added more chocolate around the base of the handles to add more stability to them and let that fully firm up. Lookin’ good!

Now I have to insert four support straws…..

………that will hold up the cake circle that will support the weight of the heavy chocolate eggs.

Looks like an Easter basket now! I just added pieces of rolled out ivory fondant in a free form blanket shape and placed the eggs on top. So pretty! But hmmm……. that handle does not look quite as straight as it did when I put it in. Oh well, I am sure it will be fine.

I added a pink gumpaste ribbon and bow, and piped buttercream grass to complete my project. Boy, that handle is getting wonkier looking. I checked it; it seems solidly in place and stable. Well, it is time to go deliver. I am going to drive because hubby has been banned from driving with cakes after that last episode we will not speak of.

Here you can see where I clipped the broken handle down as low as I could to the top of the cake without disturbing the other decorations. I dare not attempt to take the pieces out of the cake that were embedded. My plan was just to cover these spots with a little bit more blanket, that is until a lightbulb went off! I had an idea!

I would make small side handles! I could do this over wire, and it would not require the handles to have any drying time before I applied them. I bent some floral wire into the desired shape, and simply wrapped a clay gun string around it.

I coated the ends of the wire with chocolate, and after that was dry, I inserted the handles into both sides of the cake. I used melted chocolate to close in any holes or gaps where fresh cake was exposed, and also to secure the new handles in place.

I think I might even like it better than the first version. Whew, so glad that worked out, because who ever heard of an Easter basket with no handles?

So all is well that ends well! I hope you guys give this basket technique a try. I would suggest using a lot of tylose or gumpaste in your handle, and give it at least a week to dry if not longer. Or possibly even form it over very sturdy wire that can provide some support. I have made large handles using this method many times with success; I think this time it had not dried long/hard enough.

Oh and make TWO of everything!

Happy Caking Everyone!

Sharon
http://www.sugaredproductions.com/