Sock Monkey Party - Desserts

So the sock monkey party has come and gone, now it's time to go over everything!

I'll start with the desserts. My icing skills are not always great, but I did my best. I made monkey cupcakes for the party goers and a chocolate smash cake for the birthday girl.

The dessert table

The monkey cupcakes were yellow cake with chocolate icing. I displayed them on my (luckily!) red and white cake plate from Crate & Barrel and my red cupcake holder from Target. It was lucky for this party's colors that my favorite color is already red!

I used regular Nilla wafers for the mouth/nose area, and mini Nilla wafers cut in half for the ears. TIP: when you cut the mini Nillas, saw them with slight pressure from the knife rather than cut. They will stay together better and you'll have less loss. I used chocolate chips for the eyes - you could also use black icing, but the chips were faster and I had a lot of cupcakes to ice! They are also pretty cute. The mouths are red gel icing in the tube - easy peasy.

Half the mouths were open and half were closed, just for funsies!

I used a 6 inch spring form pan to make the chocolate smash cake. I bought mine at Michael's, which was the only place I could find any 6 inch pan. It was the perfect size - obviously Emily barely ate any of the cake, but it is mostly for looks anyway. It was a good size for icing. They also make a 4.5 inch spring form pan, but it felt too small. I used vanilla and chocolate buttercream for the monkey. The eyes are vanilla buttercream with a drop of black dye, and the mouth and hat are dyed red. (Which actually looked more pink in person - a true red is really, really hard to get. I would probably use the red gel icing if I did it again.) 

Not the best icing job in the world, but passable.

 I also made a candy cake with red, white, and brown M&Ms, surrounded by Kit-Kats and tied with a pretty red polka-dot bow. The original link I saw for this uses cake topped with M&Ms, with the Kit-Kats iced to the outside. I already had more than enough cake, so I turned a 9 inch round cake pan upside down, iced the Kit-Kats to to outside with a little chocolate buttercream, and put the M&Ms on top. It worked perfectly!

Can't even tell there's a cake pan under there!

Everything turned out pretty well, and it all tasted good, which is the most important part!