Now I talk like a robot

I wanted to do something special for Josh's birthday and also my friend Rachael's birthday. We are having a little get together tomorrow night and I wanted to have some baked goodies for the festivities. I wanted, of course, to do something creative for them. I found some ideas online and finally found one that seemed like it would be a lot of fun, definitely a challenge, but definitely fun.

After some exploring I came across this design by Hello Naomi. She has a lot of great ideas, you should check her out. I completely fell in love with this robot design.



They are so adorable, but the process was very tedious. It took me all afternoon. I made everything from scratch except the cupcakes themselves. I'm not superwoman.

I bought Josh's favorite flavor cake, Dark Chocolate and whipped me up some cupcakes.

I decided to try my hand at making homemade fondant. I've used Wilton before, and to be honest I found it to taste pretty blah, and then I used Satin Ice, which tasted much better but it's quite expensive. I would have paid about 25 bucks for Satin Ice and I paid about 7 bucks for these ingredients. It was a really easy recipe but quite messy.

First I took 16 oz. of Marshmallows and melted them in a microwave safe bowl with 4 Tbsp. of water for 2 minutes and then stirred until all the lumps were out. Then I gradually added 3 lbs of powdered sugar and kneaded it to the Marshmallow mix until it became a doughy consistency.

As I worked with the fondant I had to continue to add the powdered sugar because it was still quite sticky. I then rolled it out on a mat covered in powdered sugar and used a round cookie cutter to create the circles of fondant to top the cupcakes with.

To keep the fondant on the cupcakes I simply frosted the cupcakes with some buttercream frosting as a glue so the fondant would stick.
I needed quite a few different colors of fondant for the robots so I separated out some fondant and colored the fondant with food coloring gels. The gels caused the fondant to get sticky again so I had to keep my hands powdered with the sugar in order to keep it from getting out of control. I then put it into the baggies and refrigerated it for about 10 minutes so it would harden a bit.
Next, I took a paring knife and began to cut out the individual shapes for all of the robots. This was quite time consuming seeing that the parts are very particular but it was fun giving each of the robots character. To get the colored fondant to stick to each other I brushed a little bit of water on it so it would be adhesive.
Many thanks to my parents for letting me use their kitchen. Our little apartment kitchen would have made me insane trying to do this project today. I was quite a happy camper having that extra counter space to spread out.
After about 5 hours of hard work, I finally had the finished project. I think they turned out fantastic and will be a huge hit at the party!
The fun thing about these robots being on cupcakes is the fact that you can mix and match their body parts to create new robots. This was definitely a fun project and I'm really pleased with the outcome.

"Meep meep bo beep meep."
Translated, that means Happy Birthday Josh and Rachael.