Balls

So The Boy is turning 9 in a couple of weeks, and to give (myself) some breathing room between the birthday bash and the Christmas bonanza, I decided to have his birthday party next week.  When I asked him what kind of cake he wanted, he begged me for a cake in the shape of a pokeball.

Now, for those of you who don’t have soon-to-be-9-year-old boys living with you, don’t watch kids TV, and/or don’t have a love of Japanese invasion characters (basically if you’ve been living under a rock), this is a pokeball:

 

I thought about this for a while, wondering how much it would set me back to have one made, and eventually deciding that I would make my own miniature (cupcake-sized) pokeballs for each kid to eat.

Having never worked with rounded cupcake pans and frosting that dries shiny before, I wanted to run through a test batch this weekend to iron out any kinks in the process and practice decorating them (read: screwing them up).  I first thought I would be a genius and carve out the centers of each half and hide a little plastic pokemon toy inside.  Then I realized that the toys I had as party favors would be too big for that.  The boy had the idea of filling the bottom half with vanilla pudding like his favorite donuts.  So we decided to try that for the test batch and see how that went.

I spent a long time (and almost a whole bottle of red food coloring) trying to get the red frosting to be red and not peptobismol pink.  In the process I ended up with one purple index finger (from the black frosting) and 9 bright pink ones.   Why couldn’t I be cool and end up with a red right hand? (I love you, Nick Cave and all your Bad Seeds.)

Below are photos of my actual cakes as I decorated them.  Yep, my cell phone is slightly pink in spots now too.

One down… so many to go…

The second one came out much better than the first.

Two happy little pokeballs!

All the tops are done… now for those blasted circles on the front…

Finally! They’re all done…