Hunger Games Cupcakes

I watched The Hunger Games movie the weekend right after it came out. Overall, it was pretty good (I'd watch it again), but like most movie adaptations, not as good as the book, which I absolutely adore.

There were many things I enjoyed about the movie. The casting was great, especially the actors cast for Cinna, Effie, Caesar Flickerman, and Rue (hoping for an equally good cast for Catching Fire: Finnick!!!). Non-spoiler things I enjoyed in the movie: Seneca Crane's beard, the fire dress (exactly how I imagined it), and awkward Gale scenes. Anyway, if you haven't read the books, I highly recommend that you read them! In particular, read Catching Fire, my favorite :).

I've been meaning to bake something Hunger Games themed for a while. Finally, I decided to make cupcakes based on different Hunger Games characters. Since Katniss is the protagonist, I had to make a cupcake based on her. These were inspired by the costume she wore to represent District 12 (the black one that lit on fire) and her archery.

Peeta is my second favorite character, after Finnick, so he got cupcake as well (sorry Gale, Peeta's the nice, artistic boy who paints and bakes). In the arena, he uses his awesome cake icing skills to imitate nature in order to camouflage himself, so I topped off his cakes with pretty, "natural" frosting leaves. And because he is the "boy with the bread", I finished each cupcake with a chocolate bread slice.

I loved Effie's "look" in the movie, so I thought to take an element from her appearance and adapt it to a cupcake. I ended up representing her hair with curly pink swirls of frosting and adorned the frosting hair with big purple flowers.

Of course the villain of the story needs to be represented as well, so President Snow got a cupcake as well. His signature items are the genetically modified white roses always pinned to his lapel, which he uses to mask his bloody breath. Thus, my cupcakes based on him are iced in black and topped with white blood-stained roses.

The Lorax Cake

The Lorax movie looks pretty adorable, judging from the previews. Don't know if I'm going to see it in theaters (I tend to shy away from going to kid-packed movies), but I look forward to borrowing the DVD!

I love the film's soft and colorful animation. The truffula trees look nice and fluffy, like cotton candy, which is what inspired me to make this cake. I thought a multicolored layer cake decorated with cotton candy truffula trees would be cute, with the color of the cake layers matching the colors of the cotton candy. It's a basic white cake tinted pink, blue, and yellow (inspired by Whisk Kid's Rainbow Cake). To finish, I altered one of the posters for The Lorax movie to feature not only the Lorax, but also some Swomee-Swans, Bar-ba-loots, and Humming-fish to make a colorful decoration for the side of the cake.

Constellation Cheesecake Tarts

Happy President's Day! This post has absolutely nothing to do with President's Day, but nonetheless, I hope all of you in the US had a wonderful 3-day weekend. Now on with the post...

Way before college, back in elementary school, I was already a budding science nerd. But my fascination with science was on a larger scale (as opposed to my college focus on molecular and cell biology), leaning more towards things that could be seen by the naked eye, like animals, plants, the rainforest, and fossils. One topic that really captured my attention was outer space. I was obsessed with anything and everything related to it: the stars, the moon, planets, black holes, comets, etc.

Today's post is inspired by that childhood interest in outer space. Beyond science, stars in particular were interesting to me as they formed bright connect-the-dot images in the night sky, appealing to my visual nature. Moreover, tying in Greek and Roman mythology, each constellation has its own story, which made them all the more fascinating. Thus, I really wanted to base a baking project on constellations. Since blueberries go so well with cheesecake, I thought I could play around with a recipe and make something constellation related with a blueberry glaze acting as the night sky.

What I ended up with was this recipe. They're basically simple mini cheesecakes, but instead of baking them in muffin liners, I made them in mini tart pans, forming cheesecake tarts (which also increases the crust to filling ratio, and as I've mentioned before, I'm a crust person). I strained my preserves and added a bit of gelatin to the jam glaze so that it would set smoothly, giving me a flat surface to decorate. And finally, I made many little white chocolate stars to place on top of each cheesecake in the form of a variety of constellations, completing my constellation cheesecake tarts.

Multilingual Conversation Hearts

Happy (belated) Valentine's Day!!! Thanks to all of you who replied to my facebook post. Your replies were quite helpful for today's post.

Every year, Conversation Hearts always feature some new messages to keep up with the times. But why stop with just English? I love learning languages, so I decided to combine that fascination for foreign languages with my Valentine's project for this year. I'm fluent in French and Chinese and I've learned basic Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and Hungarian, so a combination of my own knowledge, the awesome input from some of you, and Google helped me come up with the messages for these Multilingual Conversation Hearts.

I first came up with the idea when I noticed the leftover letters from my parents' Do-It-Yourself Stamp Kit sitting in a cabinet, waiting to be used. I saw that in addition to the normal letters and numbers, there were some special character stamps, like Ä, Þ, and Ɖ, and thought it'd be cool to incorporate the stamps into something on this blog. I guess I also had Valentine's Day candy on my mind as well because not long after that, I ended up with this idea.

These aren't an exact match to the actual candy, but they're pretty close (they're softer in texture). I can't really judge the taste because I used flavors different from the actual candy flavors (I basically found all the extracts I have and used one for each color). But these candies are totally fun because they're customizable in color, flavoring, shape, and message. Plus, the recipe isn't too difficult. This would definitely make a great project for next Valentine's Day :).

"I Love You" from top L->R:
Russian, Malay, Norse, Japanese, Greenlandic, Portuguese, French, Swedish, Dutch, Hungarian, Chinese, Greek, Irish, ASL, Tagalog, Italian, German, Finnish, Vietnamese, Korean, Spanish