Showing posts with label fondant. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fondant. Show all posts

Wednesday, 20 July 2011

Ahoy there me hearties!

I always seem to make really cute girlie cupcakes. Not sure whether it is because of the nature of cupcakes itself being cute or because I like cute things? Ah well, food for thought (or more specifically, cupcake for thought).

Poor Zachy! Every time I make cupcakes for a family gathering, he is always stuck with a girlie looking cupcake. I have tried to make cupcakes more boy friendly in the past by putting little dinosaur sprinkles on the cupcake, but it still somehow looks a little girlie.

This past weekend, I was determined to make Zach a good old fashion masculine cupcake (if there is such a thing). I decided to put to use the pirate cupcake wrappers my mother-in-law brought me a couple months ago. The wrappers were black with orange and white skulls on it. Not pretty or cute at all! Very serious stuff.

While my vanilla cupcakes were baking away nicely in the oven, I decided to make a pirate cupcake topper for my all time masculine boyish cupcake for Zach. Early this year, Zach’s pre-primary class learnt about the sea and pirates. They even had a dress up day at school were all the boys dressed up in pirate outfits. Of course, my sister-in-law went above and beyond her call of duty and made an amazing pirate costume for Zach. To see a photo of it, please go visit her blog: http://baroquemoments.blogspot.com/2011/05/how-to-make-pirate-costume-and.html. She is truly amazing!

Anyway, more importantly back to ME, whoops, I mean cupcakes! An hour later, the cupcakes were cooked, cooled and ready for icing. I used my flavour of the month, 2D Wilton nozzle, and piped the vanilla butter cream icing onto the cupcakes into little swirl peaks. Then topped the cupcake off with the pirate topper! As you can see from the photo below, the topper was still a little wet as I had not given it enough time to dry before snapping the camera.


Later that evening, I had to bake another batch of cupcakes for my staff members as I was holding a briefing the next day. Half way through spooning the mixture into the cupcake patties, I realised that I had to make some semi-masculine cupcakes for my male staff members. I wasn’t sure whether they would be comfortable eating dainty, cute bunny cupcakes! So I had to think on my feet and improvise. I still had some pirate cupcake wrappers left, so I decided to use them.

While the cupcakes were baking away, I wasn’t sure how I was going to decorate the male orientated cupcakes as all I had was bunnies! Then it hit me. BAM! Out of no where. I could make masculine bunny pirate cupcakes! So, I took out my edible ink pen and drew eye patches on some of the bunnies.


There you have it! Masculine bunny pirate cupcakes. Aren’t they cute? Oh deary me, I mean aren’t they totally bad ass?!  

Friday, 20 May 2011

Everything changed the day she found fondant!

I was introduced to the wonderful world of fondant late last year and I have never looked back.  I would go as far as to say that it has changed my baking life. Personally, I do not like the taste of fondant, and now I know how much it needs to be handled in order to make decorations, it kind of creeps me out to think how much the fondant on other people’s cakes has been played with! I am glad other people don’t share the same irrational quirks as I do, otherwise I would be out of business before I could even get started. I feel as though I need to explain myself, so just for the record, I am very hygienic - I wash my hands and use clean utensils FYI!

I first experimented with fondant for my little niece Emily’s baptism and first birthday. Never having used fondant before, I didn’t know what type of cake the fondant would go well with. After a little bit of research, I realised that fondant is mainly used on wedding cakes to cover chocolate mud cake or fruit cake. Not being a big fan of fruit cake, I decided to make white chocolate mud cupcakes instead.

For Emily’s baptism, I made pink cupcakes with white bows and letters spelling out her name. At the time, Emily had a little duckie that she loved dearly, so I tried to replicate the duckie out of fondant (somewhat unsuccessfully - the duck kinda looks scary).


For Emily’s all important first birthday, I decorated the cupcakes with fondant cupcake decorations. Yes, I made cupcake cupcakes! Crazy times...


But like Zachary says, a birthday party is not a party unless there is a birthday cake! So of course I had to make Emily a birthday cake, a three dimensional duck cake in fact.


My beautiful friend Rohini told me recently that our friend Daniel commented on my baking saying that “everything changed the day she found fondant”. And he is absolutely right, everything did change, fondant rocks my world and has turned my baking life upside down! Fondant opened my eyes and heart to the wonders of cupcake decorating.  Anything is possible with fondant!