Bee Treats

Recently our church youth group had an activity that had a Beehive/Bee theme.  I was asked to bring refreshments and was finding it hard to come up with any good/easy ideas. As I was pondering I got a bee in my bonnet and thought, "Hmmm, what could I make with Honeycomb cereal."  Of course whenever I think of cereal and treats, I think of rice crispy treats.  So I modified that recipe to use Honeycomb and decorated the tops of the treats with these cute little (and easy to do) m&m bees.  It was one of those things that turned out WAAAAY BETTER than I ever imagined.

Bee Treats

1/4 cup butter
1 bag miniature marshmallows
6 cups Honeycomb cereal
1 cup frozen m&m's
Few drops yellow food coloring (optional)

Before you start, open the bag of m&m's and pick out all of the brown and yellow ones - you'll need these to make your bees!!  Put the rest in the freezer to stir into your Honeycomb treats later.

In a large saucepan melt the butter over low heat. Add the marshmallows and stir until completely melted. Remove from heat (if you decide to make some of your treats yellow - now is the time to stir in that yellow food coloring).

Pour over the Honeycomb cereal in a very large bowl. Stir until well coated.

Quickly, before the goo starts to set, stir in your frozen m&m's. Notice there are no yellow or brown m&m's left!

Using a buttered spatula or wax paper evenly and firmly press the mixture into 13 x 9 x 2-inch pan coated with cooking spray. Cool.

At this point I also made a batch of yellow colored treats (with no m&m's mixed in and not to be decorated with bees) just to make sure I had plenty of treats for the occassion.

Here is the yellow goo (with food coloring added).

Being poured over the Honeycomb.

Pressed into the pan.

Here are the pans of unadorned treats.  I made two batches of the m&m kind, beecause I knew there would be about 22 girls at the activity.

After they have cooled cut them into squares.  I got 12 squares per pan.

All right, it's time to make some bees!! I found this picture and instructions to help me out.

Bees

Lots of yellow and brown m&m's
1 bag sliced almonds
Small candy sprinkles (for the eye pupils)
Toothpick
Tweezers
Frosting (either a white canned frosting, or you can whip up a quick batch by creaming 1/4 cup shortening and 2 cups confectioners sugar until smooth, then mixing in 2 1/2 T. milk and 1/2 t. vanilla until smooth and stiff - about 5 minutes)  I made my own frosting because I like the texture and super white color.

First make the eyes (as you can imagine this was the most tedious part of the whole process) by using a toothpick to dab 2 small dots of frosting on a brown m&m.  Use tweezers to set 1 candy sprinkle on top of the frosting and press in place.  Repeat until you have enough cute little bee faces for your treats.

Phew, the tedious part is done! Now it's time to assemble the bees. First, using a star tip, pipe a mound of frosting on top of the Honeycomb square.

Next start building your bee.  Start with a yellow m&m at the bottom, next a brown, then another yellow. . .

Carefully put a little brown face at the top.

Give him 2 little almond slices for wings - bzzzzzzzzzz.

Here are a side and back view.

Repeat until all of your treats look un-bee-lievable!

Then take them to your activity. . .you'll be all the buzz ;)

Zebra Cake

So, my daughter's Sweet 16th birthday was coming up and she decided on an animal print theme.  So we went with a "Wild Thing Sweet 16 Party."  I wanted her to have a cool cake, but the local grocery store bakeries didn't have what I wanted, and I didn't want to spend a fortune to have it made by a real cake decorator. So, I did a little research and came up with a plan to have both the inside and the outside of the cake have zebra stripes! I know - cool, right?! Here is the process for my inside and out zebra cake.

First I needed the cake layers. I found many references on the web on how to make a cake that when you cut into it looks like zebra stripes. Click here to see the process of pouring alternate colors of cake batter into the pan to make zebra stripes. For my cakes I just used boxed cake mixes - white and devils food.

Assembly of ingredients

I found that one box of white and one box of devils food made enough batter to make one 10 inch round layer and one 6 inch round layer plus about 9 cupcakes with the leftover batter.  I did the whole process twice to create all my layers.

Batter poured into pan

Cupcakes made from extra batter

After I baked and cooled the cake layers, I removed them from the pans and put them on cardboard cake rounds.  I needed the cakes to be absolutely level so that the final product would look, well not crooked. The cake decorating supply department had this really cool cake topper gadget for evenly removing the rounded cake tops.

Man I totally love that thing! Here is my level cake layer:

Then I put chocolate frosting between the 10 inch layers to make my cake base, and the 6 inch layers to make my cake top.

Notice the big chunk of cake that tore out of the bottom of one of my 10 inch layers when I removed it from the pan.  I didn't freak out about it, I just filled it in with my buttercream frosting when I did my crumb coat.

See, you can't even tell.  Now a person could make the buttercream to do this smooth crumb coat, but I decided to save myself some time and purchased two containers of cake decorating frosting.  I allowed the crumb coat to harden uncovered in the refrigerator overnight.

Then rolled out the fondant and covered the cake.  I watched this YouTube video to figure out how to do it.

I trimmed off the excess with my pizza cutter.

And used this handy little fondant smoother to "polish" and smooth.

I added some lime green food color gel to some more fondant and did the same thing to my top layer.

Here are my top and base all ready to earn their zebra stripes and giraffe dots.

Before I stacked the layers or decorated the lower layer with stripes, I marked the top of the lower tier by tracing around the 6 inch pan base with a knife tip.  This left me with an indentation in the fondant showing where the top tier would be placed later. I also measured and cut 4 cake dowels and pushed them into the cake within the marked circle below to keep the cake from collapsing once the top got put on - sorry, I forgot to take a picture of this.

I watched this awesome YouTube video on how to make a fondant zebra stripe cake.  I just used white fondant and mixed in black food color gel since my cake decorating department isn't large enough to carry pre made black fondant.

I then covered the top layer in black giraffe spots.  The real deal would've been yellow with brown spots, but the lime green and black matched her party colors better.  Then I made a bow out of hot pink colored fondant. Here are the final elements of the cake.

Then I stacked the tiers.

Put the pink ribbon on. The bow still had to dry for 24 hours, so it's not on the cake yet.

Sent out invitations.

And has us a grrrrrrreat party!

Oh, and here's a picture of two of the slices (trust me it's hard to cut into the cake when you put so much time into it).

Yay - the zebra stripes go all the way through the cake!!