Academy Awards Night!

A  few good friends met us at our favorite bar to enjoy the Academy Awards yesterday. I decided to take this opportunity to try something new that I've been wanting to do ... I've watched all those baking shows like Cake Boss and Amazing Cakes and the like where they include sculptures using rice krispy treats as a base which I've never tried before. I whipped up a batch of those sticky treats and I got a found a tip about crushing up the rice krispys for a smoother surface ... that actually did work out well. I knew that I wanted to attempt to recreate an Oscar statuette. I found a few pictures online and began the process. I think it was a good effort for my first time ... I do need to work on proportions since I think it looked a bit more like E.T. than Oscar ... but oh well. I used a wood dowel through the middle for support and to have something I was able to stick into the base. I then made a batch of modeling chocolate to go over the rice krispy treat figure ... I had some metalic gold powder coloring to give Oscar his golden glow. I did have to put it into the microwave to warm up the treats as I found out when they cooled down it was harder to use them for sculpting.
I made up some devil's food chocolate cupcakes and decided to give them a shot of coffee flavor ... I swapped out some nice strong coffee to some of the liquid in the recipe. I make up about 5 dozen mini cupcakes and let them cool down. Gave one a taste and decided that it didn't have enough of the coffee flavor. I thought I'd throw some instant  cappuccino into some warmed milk in the buttercream frosting I made up. Think I'll get some instant espresso for next time for a more intense coffee flavoring. I had some molding chocolate left over so decided to roll it out and press out small stars to top them off ... and of course, they needed to be gold as well ... so I took a little cup and made some "gold paint" by pouring little bit of vodka into the dried gold powder. This worked great. All the stars got a little paint job. Here are some pictures to show how this all turned out.
Hopefully my next try will be a bit easier subject matter. : )