A bear-eating bear and some pup-cakes

I’ve been pretty busy with work and grad school these past few months so I haven’t had much time for anything cake related. Or anything else related, really. But I do have a birthday cake and some cupcakes to share.

I made this little cake for my mother’s birthday in late June. It’s a small bear baked in a mini Wilton stand-up bear cake pan. It's about 5 inches tall. The bear is made from chocolate chip pound cake and covered in chocolate buttercream icing. The tree stump is made from the same cake and icing, and the small birthday cake on top is made from gumdrop cake covered in vanilla buttercream and decorated with mini cub gummy bears.

I made the flowers and toadstools from marshmallow fondant. I used a large flower-shaped fondant cutter as a sort of bowl and filled it to overflowing with regular gummy bears and the mini cub bears. I thought it would be fun for the bear to be eating a pile of gummy bears on her birthday. If there was a Heather-shaped candy, I'd definitely want to sit out in the grass and eat a big bowl of them on my birthday. The only thing that comes close to Heather-shaped candy is Sour Patch Kids, and they're only vaguely human looking.

Then I got bored one night a few weeks ago and made some spur-of-the-moment cupcakes for fun. These are vanilla cupcakes with vanilla and chocolate icing. I made dogs (pup-cakes!) and a boy and a girl.

 

I wanted the dogs with the collars to look like they had long, fluffy brown ears but the icing tip made it hard to get the ears to look anything other than spiky. The white dogs look like...white dogs. Terriers or something, I guess. Anyway, they tasted good. I brought the cupcakes in to work and then were all gone by 11:30 a.m. Pup-cakes for breakfast.

Pupcakes for Breakfast. That sounds like the name of a children's book.