Crissa's Cake Corner!: My Melody Tsum Tsum Candyland Cake & Desserts

Tsum Tsum fever! Yes, those little cute sausaged-shaped versions of our favourite childhood characters, like Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy. Tsum Tsums were originally just Disney characters, but then the series expanded to include Pixar, Marvel and even Star Wars (all Disney-owned, by the way)! Well, make room for new characters, cuz Sanrio has just joined the Tsum Tsum family! Yup, Sanrio favourites like Keroppi, Hello Kitty & My Melody have now assumed stackable sausage shapes! I don't think Disney has bought Sanrio over so I'm not even sure if these "Sanrio Tsum Tsum" are the real deal, but they are now widely available!

My Melody Tsum Tsum in Candyland Cake

So, the birthday girl's mummy was on the ball when she picked Sanrio Tsum Tsum (specifically My Melody Tsum Tsum in Candyland) as the theme for her daughter's 1st birthday, cuz these little cuties are so new that nobody has done this theme yet! For the dessert table, I got to make the cake pops, cupcakes, cookies, and the birthday cake!

pipe a contrasting colour on the surface of the chocolate

submerge cake pop

Since it's also a Candyland theme, for the cake pops, I made two types of candy. I really wanted to try that new marble swirl dipping technique for these ones. Instead of just dipping the cake pops in melted chocolate of a single colour, a second colour is piped on the surface of the chocolate before dipping the cake pop as usual. The result is a cool swirl pattern, of which no two cake pops will exactly be the same.

interesting patterns on these marble swirl cake pops

For the first of the cake pops, I tried red on white, but the pattern didn't come out as cool as I had hoped, so I piped a red swirl on each cake pop after dipping. I added the "wrapper" ends just buy cutting out circles of fondant and scrunching each circle to get the effect.

Candy swirl cake pops

The other cake pops were blue, with pink stripes. This I did by piping 4 lines on the surface of the dipping chocolate, to get 8 wedges, before dipping the cake pop in and twirling it slightly on the way out. It made a cool pattern on the cake pop!

pink and white frosting swirl

For the cupcakes, there was more swirling! Pink and white vanilla Swiss meringue frosting were put together in the same piping bag fitted with a round piping coupler (haaa, yes not a nozzle) and then piped out on orange-chocolate chunk cupcakes. I love the two-toned swirl effect.

Sanrio Tsum Tsum Sugar Cookies

Now, for the cookies, I made one of each of the Sanrio Tsum Tsum characters that appear on the party backdrop, as well as two candy-cupcake houses. I didn't have cutters for these so I had to improvise and combine other cutters that I have to get the right shapes. Thank goodness I didn't have too many cookies to do!

Cupcake Candy house, just like the one on the party backdrop!

I'm really liking royal icing these days. For detailed character cookies, it is SO much easier to pipe and decorate with royal icing than it is to cut all those little shapes out of fondant! (Do you remember these crazy Applejack Pony & Dusty Crophopper cookies I decorated using fondant? Madness.) The only time consuming part is prepping all the colours of royal icing, but after that, it's all good! I use single consistency (15 second) icing so I don't bother with an outline and flood, and I don't use piping tips so I don't even have to wash between colours! Best thing for a ~~lazy~~ busy person like me.

Cupcake Candy House and The Little Twin Stars

My Melody, Kuromi & Hello Kitty

I'm really paranoid about dark colours bleeding into the lighter colours ever since the Spiderman cookie fiasco, so I really let the different sections set (about 1 hour in an air-conditioned room) before piping on the next colour. I only do wet-on-wet technique if the colours aren't too likely to bleed (like the spots on the candy house). I'm loving how these cookies turned out!

Keroppi, Pompompurin & Badtz Maru

The cookies were bagged individually and tied with a ribbon because they were going to be hung on a "cookie tree". I totally forgot (again!) to punch a hole in the actual cookies themselves before baking. Oops!

Cookie Tree ornaments, all packaged up

Now, for the 2-tier birthday cake! The top tier is an eggless chocolate cake and the bottom tier is rum and raisin cake, with a yummy Bacardi rum buttercream filling too!! (Who says the adults can't have a little fun at a kid's birthday party?)

folding the rum-soaked raisins into the cake batter

all ready for rum Swiss meringue buttercream filling!

It was so much fun making the Tsum Tsum figurines to go on the cake: Keroppi, Pompompurin, the Little Twin Stars (Kiki & Lala), and of course, a large My Melody Tsum Tsum to top the cake! My Melody is made out of Rice Krispie treats cuz she would've just been way too heavy and sink into the cake if she was completely made out of fondant.

My Melody and friends sugar figurines

large My Melody Tsum Tsum cake topper

lots of Candyland elements & fondant pinwheels

To tie it into the Candyland theme, the cake also had candy elements like lollipops, sweets & candies, and some cool fondant pinwheels! It was fun making those too. They're made just like one would make a paper windmill, by making slits halfway up the four corners of a square piece of fondant, and bringing the corners together at the centre.

view from the top

Tsum Tsums are made to be stacked!

closer look at the pastel rainbow flag bunting

Lala & Kiki figurines

love the little My Melody bow at the back!

All these desserts went on this rainbow-pastel, fully-loaded My Melody Tsum Tsum & friends in Candyland-themed dessert table, styled by All Mommy Wants. I love the fun candy swirl balloons and all the cartoon character cutouts! The candy swirl hot air balloon photo booth is really cool too! Happy 1st Birthday, Kaylene!