The Day of the Doctor/Nerdtastic Weekend!

Fish fingers and custard!!!! That could only mean one thing... Doctor Who 50th Anniversary viewing party!! It was a fantastic weekend which I'm going to say started Thursday evening when I went to see Catching Fire.

This was me at work Thursday, way too excited to see the movie. I didn't really have time to get a costume together since I was travelling like crazy this month. Nothing a Mockingjay pin can't fix though! The movie was everything I wanted. JLaw can do no wrong in my eyes. I liked it so much that I'm going to see it again tonight in IMAX. The audience was a little dissapointing, our theater was only half full - so not quite the opening night experience I was hoping for. But guess it didn't really matter in the end because the movie was FANTASTIC.

Saturday I woke up and immediately started baking. I bought some great Doctor Who cookie cutters from WarpZonePrints. I dyed the dough blue and grey since I didn't have time to ice the cookies.

I bought TARDIS, DW, Weeping Angel, Adipose, Cyberman, Dalek, and Doctors 8,9, & 10 cookie cutters. Though I didn't use the Doctors and realized after I finished that I also forgot to use the Dalek cutter. Oh well - They'll get some use for the Christmas Special.

I threw some disco dust on the cookies once they came out of the oven.

I love how they turned out!

I found a recipe online for cookies that look like fish fingers. (Because who really eats fish fingers with custard...) I bought a set of shot glasses at Comic-con this summer that display all 11 doctors and have a disappearing TARDIS on the back. (When the glass is warm the TARDIS turns white). They were perfect vessels for custard!

I bought a groupon a while back for personalized M&Ms. I've always wanted to make them. I chose 4 different phrases - "Allons-y", "Geronimo!", "Doctor Who?", and "Bow ties are cool" and had them printed on TARDIS blue M&Ms. mmmmmmm

I also set out some 3D glasses and bow ties for the event. Got to represent both my Doctors!

I got a silicone Doctor Who ice mold for the 50th Anniversary Reddit exchange so we could drink in style - melting Dalek's and TARDIS's alike. The movie was just... SO GOOD. Everything I could have wanted. The interactions between the 3 doctors was gold. So many great one-liners. 

I went and saw it again in the theater last night in 3D. It was so fun. Unlike Catching Fire, the theater was completely sold out and the crowd was awesome.

My favorite was the 6 year old behind us in line dressed as a Cyberman telling everyone they would be deleted. One day I hope to have a child as awesome as this.

I even brought my own special snack for the movie :) It was great to watch it with so many fellow Whovians who screamed every time David Tennant came on screen, gasped, cheered, clapped, and yelled in all the right places, and nearly lost their minds towards the end of the movie. (if you saw it, you probably know what part I'm talking about.)

Hope everyone else had as great of a viewing experience as I did!!

Costumes at Comic-Con Part 2

Last week I talked about our costumes and all the little ways you can dress up at Comic-con with the free stuff you get. This week is dedicated to all the people I saw who had awesome cosplays. Above is me and the sibs posing with Shawn of the Dead who looks eerily like Simon Pegg. In fact, when my brother and I went to the screening for The World's End, this guy was there in this costume, and Simon Pegg just stopped what he was saying and exclaimed "Hey look! It's me!"

Jamie Lannister

I love to people watch. That's probably part of the reason I like amusement parks so much. There is no better people watching that at Comic-con. It's part of what makes waiting in line for 10 hours and then never getting into the panel you wanted bearable. You're constantly being entertained by people's creativity and dedication to their costumes.

Beaker!

While weaving in and out of the line for Hall H, we definitely saw a lot of awesome costumes. You can never go wrong with Muppets.

Here is somebody doing Pride & Prejudice & Zombies right! Muddy skirt, brain in hand, bloody hand print - the works! (The brain is actually a clutch and I bought one when I got home because who doesn't need a brain clutch?)

More Game of Thrones Action!

I loved seeing all of the Game of Thrones cosplay. Now that I finally caught up on the show, I could actually understand who everyone was! 

Avatar!

Avatar is another show that I watched between this year and last. We sat in on the Legend of Korra panel and it looked pretty cool, as did all of the costumes. So I decided to add Avatar to my ever growing "shows I need to watch" list. I'm pretty sure I watched the whole series in 3 weeks. It's always great when you can stream things for FREE!! 

Seeing hobbits always makes me a little giddy. I do love a good group cosplay!

Portal

I didn't even know what this was when I took a picture of it. I was just like "ooh weird moon shoes!" Thank god for my brother who plays video games and can explain who all the people are!

I love when people cross dress. A guy as Hit Girl!? Hilarious. I saw a lot of women Doctor's that were fantastic.

It's fun to see people thinking outside of the box. This girl dressed up as black and white Dorothy from Wizard of Oz. So clever! Here are a bunch we saw walking around the floor:

Cosmo and Wanda!

Headless Horseman

Woody and Bo Peep

DINOSAUR!!!

I need to get me a TARDIS dress.

Even better is when you see people in Cosplay just wandering around downtown. 

Lolz.

For when you need a good night time costume!

Chelsea and Tristan found Booker! It's always great to find characters from the same universe as you.

And last but not least - we found Shawn again. This time dressed as a Steampunk Shawn. Lovely. Here's a great video that Sneaky Zebra made after the con. You'll see a lot of these people in it. The song is also fantastic. 

Is it July 2014 yet??

VERY Belated Comic-con Post!

Since last week was Halloween and I have costumes on the mind, I thought I'd throw up my re-cap of costumes from Comic-con! (Meant to do this in July - oops.) First up - all of the stuff clan Cottle wore! This was another fantastic year at San Diego Comic-con. My brother and I flew out together with his Chewy back-pack. Gotta start things off nerdy!

We stayed at the Embassy Suites and some how lucked out and got the King Daddy of all suites.My brother and I were a little delirious as we didn't get there until midnight (3am our time). We opened the DOUBLE DOORS to find we had a 2 bedroom suite. Was not expecting that. It had it's own entrance way, a giant living room, dining room table, and 2 bathrooms! Needless to say there was a lot of jumping up and down and running around in excited circles. My sister's flight got delayed so she didn't get in until around 2 am. We told her we got the crappiest room so it was fun to be woken up by her WTF!?! yells as she walked in. 

Little sleep did not stop us from being SUPER psyched to go pick up our badges! Even if you didn't bring a costume, there were plenty of chances to dress up. 

All the Comic-con bags came with capes so you could dress up like a Superhero! 

Lots of different vendors pass out things you can dress up with. Check out these cool Hello Kitty headbands!

You could even take your picture in Uncle Scrooge's money vault. Not really dressing up, but I did get to wear a hat. After taking it all in on Thursday, my sister and I woke up early to don our first costumes of the weekend.

Strawberry Shortcake and Blueberry Muffin! We bought these wigs last year and formed our costumes around them. We spent most of Friday waiting in line to get into Hall H, which never actually happened. (cue the sad trombone!) But we did have fun in line. Tristan showed up late and we had to assemble his costume in line. Luckily people at Comic-con are awesome and everyone around us helped out. 

He was just a bunch of grapes but his costume got the most comments out of all of ours. Everybody thought he was something different. It was either Fruit of the Loom, the Lumpy Space Princess, or the Grapist. (We had to look up that last one). It was hilarious seeing what all these different people thought Tristan was when in reality, he wore it because it was a cheap costume.

Waiting in Line!

His balloons slowly deflated throughout the day, and a few of them popped. It was great watching him try to squeeze through crowds on the floor.

At least he paved a pretty nice path for Chelsea and I to follow!

Tristan and I went to an advanced screening of The World's End where we got t-shirts and cool mouth lights so we could look like the Aliens from the movie. We all dressed up again on Sunday the day of the Doctor Who panel - so I of course dressed up as a Jenny - The Doctor's Daughter.

When you're waiting in lines for hours and sleeping on concrete, you want a comfortable costume. I tried to think of which blonde character I could be from Doctor Who. Then I remembered Jenny and thought that it was the perfect costume! Easy to assemble, and I got to buy new boots!

Chelsea and Tristan went the much more detailed route. They dressed up as characters from Bioshock Infinite. A lot of people stopped to ask them for a picture - the true test of a good costume! So as you can see, there's always a way to cosplay at Comic-con - whether you've spent months preparing, or just use something they're handing out for free. Next week I'll throw up a post on the awesome costumes I saw other people wearing.

Happy Halloweeeeeeeen!!

One of my favorite days of the year! I get to wear orange and black striped tights to work, eat tons of candy, and see adorable children in costumes. Also I'm keeping up a tradition I started for myself when I moved into my current house 7 years ago of watching Hocus Pocus and ordering Pizza Hut. BEST NIGHT EVER!!

Today is also my little sister's 25th birthday. TWENTY-FIVE. She's old and I'm OLDER. waahhhhh. But We always have a great time together and I wish her the BEST birthday ever! (Though I guess it can't be that great if I'm not there to celebrate with her.) HAPPY BIRTHDAY CHELSEA!

Just because this video will never not crack me up. 

I hope everyone goes out and has a shockingly good time tonight! Happy Halloweeeeeeeeeen!

Groom's Cake - Vroom Vroom

One of my good friends Mary got married in September. I offered to make a grooms cake for the reception. Her husband is really into racing so we decided to try to incorporate his car into the cake.

This is an actual picture of his car that I lifted off of Facebook and then used as a model to make the fondant miniature.

I wasn't 100% sure how I was going to make the car. I bought red fondant in case I wanted to mold it out of that, but I wasn't sure how to get the white stripes on the side, so in the end I decided to mold it out of white fondant and paint it. I used AmericColor edible paints.

The inside of the cake is probably my favorite. I bought a checkered cake kit a while back and never knew what to use it for. When I asked what kind of cake they wanted, the bride said she liked white cake and the groom liked chocolate. I thought, I can do BOTH! And added bonus, it looks like a checkered racing flag. #Winning.

This is what the set looks like. (Bonus: hidden Mickey!) Pretty simple.

You fill the outer and inner most circles with one kind of batter...

And then the center ring with the opposite. Once all the rings are filled, you slowly remove the plastic...

Tah-dah! It's a little messy, but not as bad as you would think. Then you bake the cakes normally.

I made the almond butter cream frosting to fill between the layers.

All three layers ready to be frosted!

Then I rolled out some green fondant I bought (I used the Fondarific brand because I think it tastes the best out of all the ones I've tried) and covered the frosted cake.

Next I trimmed off the edges and added a black road, the fondant car, and some mini fondant cones I made.

Here's the cake displayed at their wedding! The ribbon around the bottom was money. It made the cake look 100 times better. It's a simple and easy way to make the edges look smooth.

Here's what the inside looked like. Now I want to go eat some chocolate. Probably going to have to buy my trick-or-treaters some more candy because I don't think what I have is going to last until Halloween!