Pastry Making and Decorating: My Neighbor Totoro

Yesterday, on January 28th, I baked buttermilk chocolate cupcakes with vanilla buttercream frosting. I used this recipe for the buttermilk chocolate cupcakes: http://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/buttermilk-chocolate-cupcakes and this recipe for the vanilla buttercream frosting: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/quick-vanilla-buttercream-frosting-recipe.html. However, I reduced the sugar for the chocolate cupcakes from 1-1/2 cups to about 1-1/4 cups and I reduced the sugar for the vanilla buttercream frosting by one cup (from 3 cups to 2 cups of confectioner's sugar).
The inspiration behind the cupcakes is the character Totoro, from the Miyazaki film My Neighbor Totoro. (For a picture of Totoro: http://www.imgbase.info/images/safe-wallpapers/anime/my_neighbor_totoro/35735_my_neighbor_totoro.jpg). Totoro is a lovable, fluffy character who lives in a tree, so I chose to bake chocolate cupcakes to make the trunk of the tree and dyed the buttercream frosting green to represent some bundles of leaves of the tree. The bundles of leaves are surrounding Totoro on the final cupcakes and Totoro is sitting on top of the "tree," just as he would be when sleeping in the tree in the film. The Totoros on my cupcakes were made out of marzipan using this recipe: http://candy.about.com/od/marzipancandyrecipes/r/Marzipan.htm. I simply dyed some of the marzipan gray, shaped the marzipan into Totoros, and placed some marzipan that had no food coloring for Totoro's stomach. I used a toothpick and some black food coloring and drew on Totoro's eyes and "mustaches" on his stomach.

The next task will be for me to once again try to bake another type of cake that's not chocolate (red velvet is essentially chocolate cake).

Total Estimated Time: 4.5 hours
Total Time Logged: 14.5 hours

Here are a few pictures of each of the sides of a single Totoro made of marzipan: