Mini edible taco cookies tutorial

So I'm back to show you my how to make cute taco cookies for your very own Dragons Love Tacos party. These cookies are so cute and tasty and all the kids will love them. [Buy the Book] If you are planning your own Dragons Love Tacos party. To check out more great party ideas check out my guest post on Spaceships and Laser Beams.

So first up you will need vanilla flavored and regular Oreo cookies, hot tamales, shredded coconut, chocolate buttercream, and orange flavored tootsie rolls. First take your regular Oreos and grind them up in a food processor. Then add the ground Oreos to a small amount of chocolate buttercream to make taco meat. Then take green food coloring and add it to your coconut to make lettuce. Next, take your orange tootsie rolls and shred them through a cheese grater to make cheese. Lastly, cut the ends of the hot tamales to make tomatoes. 

 Now that you have all the fixings you need for tacos it’s time to make the taco shells. First, pull apart the vanilla Oreos and scrap out the filling. Then you will need to cut a small portion of the end of each Oreo so that it will stand upright. Once you have completed preparing all of your taco shells you are ready to assembly your tacos. Remember for each Oreo you have you can make one taco.
Start with a line of chocolate buttercream towards the bottom of the taco where you made the knife cut. Then add the other side of the taco shell (cookie) against the buttercream line. Once you have both ends together the buttercream should hold them together upright. Make sure that you put the writing on the Oreos to the inside of the tacos so you don’t see the writing when the tacos are assembled.

Once you have your taco shells assembled you can add all of your fillings to complete your mini tacos. Start with the Oreo “taco meat” and make sure you get the Oreos to stick to the buttercream line you added previously. After the “taco meat” is added then add some shredded coconut lettuce on top. Complete each taco with shredded Tootsie roll cheese and two or three hot tamales.  Then just repeat until you have as many mini tacos as you want for your party. 

There you go super cute edible mini tacos for your Dragons Love Tacos party or for your very own Mexican fiesta. Hope you enjoyed this little tutorial and stay tuned for another great gender reveal party I have to share with you guys.

Dragons Love Tacos Third Birthday

So this year for my nephew Owen's third birthday he decided he wanted a party based on his favorite book right now which is Dragons Love Tacos by Adam Rubin. This is a super cute book about dragons that love tacos, so if you want to lure dragons to your party better serve tacos, but better watch out for that spicy salsa. I decided to use the cover art dragon for the cake but made him green instead of red because that is Owen's favorite color. Of course as with every cake we make for Owen it has to be special so we decided to make this dragon smoke because he had to much spicy salsa at this party. The smoking dragon was a big hit with all the kids. I also included sugar cookie "chips" with fruit "salsa" and dragon feet cookies. Hope you enjoy the party this year. If you missed last years party be sure to check it out here.

 

 

We decided on less desserts this year and focused more on the dragon cake. I think it turned out really well and Owen loved it!

The tacos are made from Oreo cookies. I will be sharing a tutorial on how to make them in the near future.

Of course if we wanted to lure dragons to the party we had to have a taco bar!

Time to break open the dragon pinata!

This was a favorite activity!

Too much spicy salsa for this dragon!

 Making the dragon smoke was a little tricky to figure out but we managed to pull it off and have more knowledge moving forward for our next smoking cake! Happy Birthday Owen! I hope you loved your cake and had a blast at your party! You are turning out to be one awesome little dude and I love being here to see you grow up!

Here is a short video of the cake in action!

3.0.1 Jewelry Launch Party

I am excited to share this jewelry launch cake with all of you. It was certainly a challenge to come up with a cohesive design for this cake. I was given free reign of design and told that the cake needed to display the jewelry. I didn't want to do a classic jewelry box because after researching the inspiration for the jewelry I didn't feel like a jewelry box would fit. The designers website says the jewelry is "inspired by Middle Eastern and Mediterranean culture, religion, and urban life, the collection showcases the iconic "evil eye" and other religious symbols."

When I began do design this cake for some reason the image of the jewelry hanging off a tree kept popping into my mind, so I went with it. I also wanted to tie in the designer’s Middle Eastern culture and give the cake a Mediterranean feel. So I decided to make the cake board an old looking map of the Mediterranean, from there I stacked up old looking books with 3.0.1 written on the binding. The top book I left open and had a tree growing up through the pages of the book. On the open book I wrote quotes from the website describing the jewelry.

The tree was made out of modeling chocolate that was molded around a support system and painted to look old and weathered.



For the jewelry I tried to pick different pieces from the collection that I thought summed up the inspiration for the line. The jewelry was made out of rolled fondant that I strung through a piece of fishing line so that the pieces moved like the real jewelry. I then sprayed each piece with confectioners glaze so that it was shiny like the real jewelry.

I love the way the jewelry turned out! It looked just like the real thing.



Here is the spread of the real jewelry at the party. I think I matched the collection well.

When the designer saw the cake she said that at her next show she was going to display her jewelry on trees because she like the idea so much! I would call that a successful cake! I hope you liked this cake and party! Let me know what you think.

1,000 Ideas for Decorating Cupcakes, Cookies, and Cakes

Way back when sometime last year around December, I submitted some photos for Sandra Salamony's book 1,000 Ideas for Decorating Cupcakes, Cookies and Cakes and two of my photos were selected. The book came out in November, and I finally got my copy—I am so excited.

This book is full of fun and festive ideas for any kind of celebration, and has well over 1,000 inspirational ideas from decorators all over the globe. There are so many awesome talents who contributed to this book. Here are the two cakes that made it into the book.

I hope that if you like to decorate, you check this book out. It would make the perfect gift for any decorator in your life. It is available for order from Amazon here, so go get it!