Avatar, The Last Airbender Cupcakes

If you’ve known me for long, you know that I love cupcakes. For my son’s birthday this summer, I made him some Avatar themed cupcakes.

His birthday was the week after the series finale of Avatar – The Last Airbender, a show that our entire family dearly enjoyed. I couldn’t find any Avatar cake decorating stuff, so I decided to use the decorating method that I learned about in The Whimsical Bakehouse: Fun-to-Make Cakes That Taste as Good as They Look!

I love working with decorator’s chocolate, a candy with a low melting point that isn’t really a chocolate at all. It comes in many different colors, or you can color white decorator’s chocolate and make up any shade you need with candy colors.

The method is pretty simple; first, you sketch out your design. I found some manga-ish versions of 4 of our favorite Avatar characters (Aang, Katara, Momo, and Appa) sketched them onto white paper, made sure the lines were crisp and dark enough to be seen through parchment paper, then taped everything down. Remember, everything will be flipped when you turn over your completed chocolates, so be aware of this for stuff like writing.

You warm your chocolates using the microwave, or a double boiler, and pipe it onto the parchment paper in sections. I just used plastic sandwich bags as piping bags. Going color by color, making sure that one color is cooled and set before moving onto the next, you create your image. There’s a bit of a learning curve working with the chocolates, learning how warm they need to be to draw with easily, but not melt the colors you’ve already laid down.

After your images are done, let them set, and if it’s warm in your house, pop them in the fridge to harden. Once they are firm enough to come off of the parchment paper, you can store them in an airtight container in your fridge until the day you need them, but don’t freeze them.

I was really pleased with how these came out. This method allowed me to take my time and work in advance. I was also pleased with these because it’s the 1st time I’ve ever created a theme with cupcakes. I had no desire to make 24 cupcake toppers, so I did 4 character toppers, and did something different with the rest of the cupcakes.

I made Aang’s Air Nomad marking on them with colored sugar. I made a stencil for the top of the cupcake out of parchment paper (it doesn’t stick to the icing), and then rolled the frosted cupcakes in a bowl of the blue sugar to create the arrow. I, personally, think they came out really well. Figuring something out from the concept stage to the implementation stage was really fun, and rewarding, for me.

My son’s reaction was even more rewarding.

Avatar may have possibly been the best family show of our time. It truly is a family show, not pandering to the parents with borderline sexual humor, nor talking down to the kids. The characters and plots are always well developed, and kept me watching from the first episode to the (tear-jerker) series finale. You can find the Avatar, The Last Airbender dvd sets on Amazon, and it is WELL worth it.

I can’t wait for Mimi’s birthday!

Tags: Avatar, Avatar Cupcakes, birthday, Cupcakes