Tuesday, May 7, 2013

4 Little Pigs

 


This past weekend marked the 15th Annual Flying Pig Marathon, so while we spent most of the weekend cheering on people we knew running (including our very own head food critic who ran multiple races over the weekend). When we weren't logging miles spectating and cheering, we were having a piggy themed celebration of our own, as Little Girl turned 4 this week!
 
For dinner, I made the Mushroom and Kale pasta I posted last month along with this piggy shaped foccacia bread.

Starting back at Christmas when I made a cute checkerboard cake, I started being given requirements for this weekend's birthday cake. As you can imagine, after planning a cake for 4 months, there were a lot of things, so I started working on the fondant early. If you haven't made your own fondant yet, it's worth it to try, I made a marshmallow fondant, which is a  lb bag of powdered sugar kneaded into a 16 oz package of marshmallows with a dash of vanilla flavoring. It does take some time to knead together and it's definitely sticky work, but if you coat your hands with shortening first (sounds yucky, but Crisco hands are a lot better than the sticky alternative). Once it's combined, you can refrigerate it until you're ready to use it, just bring to room temp and color.

As you can see, I divided mine to use a couple different colors, the background was a light lavendar, the ribbon and bow around the base were plain white, with a dark purple and pink polka dots.
 

 Did I mention there were pigs on top? Back to those in a minute


 Here are the kiddies cheering on the runners, they were troopers getting up early both days and walking all over downtown.

 There's our runner!! Go Daddy go!!!


Here's the top, I could definitely work on my smoothing skills, the base coat of butter cream (pink in case you were wondering) was not very smooth, and I should have thought about the impact that would have on the finished product, but now I know for next time.

On top, you'll see 4 little pigs. . .they're actually made from starbursts!  Each one took about 8, melted in a bowl for about 10 seconds to soften, then kneaded together and shaped to make little pigs. I made them a week before so they would set up and hold their shape.
 
 
Hope you had a great weekend!
 

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