A Vintage Vixen Fair

The Vintage Vixen Fair has been and gone – Sunday, 27 May 2012 to be exact! Having had the experience of being a part of Unwrapped under my belt, I approached the Vintage Vixen Fair with care and caution. I set a realistic schedule and was adamant that I was sticking to it. The plan was  this:

·         Thursday – Shop for ingredients.

·         Friday morning – Make all the fondant toppers.

·         Friday evening – Make all the cake pops.

·         Saturday morning – Package all the cake pops.

·         Saturday evening to early hours of Sunday morning – Make cupcakes and if at all possible, squeeze in a few hours’ sleep.

Did I stick to my realistic schedule? No, I certainly did not. The only thing I stuck to was shopping for all the ingredients on Thursday. Sigh – will I ever learn? Doubtful.

So on Friday morning, I decided to go to the shops to pick up some last minute items to dress the stall. While at the shop, I received a telephone call from my partner in crime, also known as my business partner and sister-in-law, Adelyn, who thought it would be a great idea to dress our store with a candy buffet! What I thought was a great decorative idea, then turned into me making macarons and her shopping for all the decorative items required to make this vision a reality! So I madly rushed around the shops and picked up the ingredients needed to make macarons.

I got home and made all the fondant toppers. To fit in with the Vintage Vixen Fair theme, I made famous vintage Hollywood actors and actresses toppers, including: Bettie Page, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Elvis Presley and Audrey Hepburn.  I think I sat in the same spot for 10 hours straight making endless toppers. All up, I made over 700 toppers! Needless to say, it was somewhat EPIC.

By the time I put the toppers aside, it was 10PM. I decided I would make my cake for the cake pops. From memory, I made nine batches of my vanilla cupcake recipe. I put it in a gigantic baking tin and went for a little nap. Two hours later, I woke from my slumber and removed the cake tin from the oven. It appeared to be cook and by this stage, I was pretty proud of myself – I had slept and made my cake pop cake! The feeling of absolute bliss consumed me!

I then got stuck into my macarons. Surprising my macarons turned out perfectly! I will have to blog about this experience separately another time with some tips. Once I had made all the macarons, in my sleepless state I decided to individually wrap each macaron like little lollies. I thought it would fit nicely into our candy buffet display. In my head, I didn’t think it would take long but this genius idea cost me over 2 hours!

After I finished making and wrapping the macarons, I checked on the cake for the cake pops. And to my dismay, it was undercooked. I tried cutting the cake into quarters and baked them individually, but it work. I outside of the cake kept burning and the inside of the cake wouldn’t cook. Regrettably I had to throw out the cake slab. So let this be a lesson, always follow the recipe and do not try and cut corners by making a massive cake batter and trying to cook it into one tray at once. So yes peeps, I had to start again from scratch. The blissful feeling quickly faded and the feeling of devastation took its place.  

Before I knew it, it was day light again and Saturday morning was upon me! I frantically made 150 cake pops. And somewhere in between, I had the lovely Dayna and Adelyn over packaging the cake pops and poof just like that it was 8PM! At this stage, I had baked no cupcakes and the Vintage Vixen Fair was in 14 hours! One word comes to mind, YIKES!

So I did what any good baker would do in my situation, I baked the night through and iced cupcakes into the wee hours of the morning. When Adelyn came in the morning to pick me and my 700 cupcakes up, I was a little dazed and confused but my cupcakes looked great!

We set up our stall and had a relatively successful day at the fair. Check out the photos below. Our little stall reminds me of a little candy shop. Oh, how I wish I had a shop front!

Can you imagine having a cuppa and cupcake in a cupcakery decorated like this? One can only dream ...