Need dessert ideas for friendly competition

[snapdragon]

DH's work has been holding dessert Friday's for the past two months. Every week a group of people bring in a dessert to share. For his week I made cupcakes with tombstones, spider rings, gummy worms for Halloween. Well he won the best dessert for his week and is now part of a dessert bake off with the other winners sceduled for next Friday. Unfortunately I am a real crappy baker and I won on the creative decorations. I want to do something unique next week, but don't have any cool ideas. Basically what I need are ideas for how to decorate cupcakes or a cake that don't look too much like a kid's birthday cake, but are still fun and look good :) I know you ladies can help me. :D Thanks,

[SingleWhiteFemale]

I don't know if you're interested in Christmas-y stuff this early in November, but I saw this cake in Food and Family the other day, and it looks pretty simple to achieve (although somewhat time-consuming).

http://kraftfoods.com/images/recipe_images/Chocolate_Cream_Ornament_Cake.jpg
Chocolate Cream Ornament Cake (http://kraftfoods.com/main.aspx?s=recipe&m=recipe/knet_recipe_display&recipe_id=97959)

[Katy]

I'd suggest two things...

1) do a search in this forum for desserts as there are quite a few yummy ones

and

2) check out the dessert thread (http://www.constantchatter.com/forum/showthread.php?t=25375) (it's still new and doesn't have all that many recipes just yet which was why I suggested #1)

[tlew12778]

Also check out the cake decorating thread in the hobbies section.

[TriSigmaNC]

Martha Stewart...she's got the BEST ideas.

[Sare79]

Hey Kate-
Is there anything specific to his field that you could do for decorations? I have a bunch of ideas, but it would be cool if you could do something related to his work.

Decorated sugar cookies might be another easy thing to do but you can make them look pretty cool with decorations.
One cool theme could be poker. Make cookies shaped like cards and decorate them, and you could make small round ones like poker chips.

[snapdragon]

Thanks Katy, I checked out the dessert thread. It has some yummy looking treats, but I was looking more for artistically decorated desserts versus something that tastes good. Whatever I make will come from a box so it needs to look good to hide that fact that it tastes like crap ;)

tlew12778- I didn't even know there was a cake decorating thread in the hobbies section. Thanks :D I guess it shows how much I venture into cooking related threads We order out a lot. :o

TriSigmaNC- Thanks for the tip, I'll have to head over there and check it out :D

Sare- He works for a major food chain in their head office as a computer programmer. I thouhgt about doing something with computers, but maybe I could mix them together like make a shopping cart full of stuff. I don't know. I'd need detailed instructions to pull that off. :p

[Sare79]

I found these:

http://www.cybercal.com/images/ComputerCookiesFaces.jpg

http://www.beautifulsweets.com/ProductPics/Large/favFruit.jpg

http://www.thenibble.com/zine/archives/images/FruitStand285.jpg

http://www.beautifulsweets.com/ProductPics/Large/Barbecue.jpg

http://www.wisconsinmade.com/wiscmade/images/products/2851l.jpg

[Pineknot]

HEY!!

Look at this....this look super simple for a non-baker.

http://www.myrajeanscakes.com/computrshape.gif

I bet the ladies on the cake thread could help you figure out how to put together the cake to form the parts.

Maybe you could put a picture of his company where the screen is? Just print it out on your puter?

[snapdragon]

PineKnot- Thanks for the idea of a computer cake. I think I am going to try that one. How hard can it be??? ;)

Sare- I love the cookie ideas you posted, but there is no way I could bake those. I have never in my life made cookies that I didn't have to scrape the blackened bottoms off of. :p :o And the wild colours and frosting?? It would be way to difficult for me. It's too bad because they look so cool, and I'm sure they would win if I was able to make them :)

[Sare79]

After I saw the computer cake posted, I did a google image search on computer cake and there are lots to choose from. There was some really cool ones. You could try that for more ideas for decorating.