Last night we made it through the first hundred!

It actually doesn’t look like that many but those little beasts took me four hours to bake and frost. By the end my neck was sore, back was crooked and legs were mad. Who would have thought baking cupcakes could be such an athletic event?

Let’s back up a little though so I can show you the end goal. Will loves Legend of Zelda and has long asked that I make him a Legend of Zelda cake. While I love cooking and baking, I’m definitely not too savvy in the cake decorating area and most Zelda cakes require some pretty extensive knowledge of fondant and piping and coloring and just a whole world of things I didn’t feel comfortable promising.

A few months ago Will came up with the idea to make a cake out of mini cupcakes with each cupcake representing a pixel (so to speak) of the entire image. He picked out the image and even made this handy little chart for me showing how many of each color we will need and then how they lay out on the grid to make the complete image.

It didn’t sound so bad at first but the 150 cupcakes we made last night (there are some unfrosted ones not pictured above) take up my whole dining room table and we don’t really have any other surfaces that are bigger and out of dog reach. Will’s project for today is to build something big enough for the finished cake since I’m completing it tonight. Whew – lots of work ahead of me.

Since I only have one pan, everything revolves around that pan. We have six boxes of mix to get through and each box makes about three batches of 24.

We made all the chocolate last night but it was slow going. The first pan goes into the oven and cooks for ten minutes. Then those immediately come out of the pan (ouch – hot) and on to a rack. The pan gets filled with more batter and back into the oven. After the first few batches were made, I started frosting as well.

With our test run, the cakes were denser and I could cut the tops off the bigger ones to make them all the same size. This is a different batter (which kinda ruins the purpose of the test run) and it’s much lighter and less stable so I am unable to shape them. As a a result, some are much bigger.

Some have lopsided tops and some are a little wobbly. But they turned out just fine once the frosting was put on.

For some reason, the black frosting came out shiny. It’s a little strange but I think it will look fine as the finished product. Of course I also got black frosting all over me but that’s a hazard of the trade I suppose.

I’m really proud of myself for not overdosing on sugar while making these. But then again, I don’t really like canned frosting so once the frosting is on, I’m safe. And since I’d rather bake as few batches as possible, I was pretty motivated not to eat any tempting cupcakes.

And that wraps up day one. Another 150 to bake tonight and then frosting needs to be colored and applied to 200 cupcakes. It’s gonna be a long one but I’m so excited to see the finished product.