Happy face sad face

Who knew 'skin tone' would be so hard to get right? The first cupcakes that I did of people were for Christmas - I did a Santa with a big white beard and red hat, and an elf with little pointy ears and a stripey hat. I used a light pink colour for their faces and they looked all flushed and kind of drunk... like they had had one too many glasses of brandy left out on Christmas eve. No pics of those ones, sorry (I must've had one too many brandies myself and forgot to photograph them).
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 So the next time I tried faces, I used 'ivory' colouring. Now my little cupcake people look anaemic and sad. Grrr.

Anyway, this is an anaemic sad baby in a beanie. One of my friends asked me what on earth I did to him to make him so sad. Maybe it's the prospect of being eaten?












So I started experimenting with other facial expressions (although secretly I really like the sad anaemic baby).
Have to credit Planet Cake Cupcakes with a lot of the ideas for expressions. I modified some and as I got more confident I started riffing on the theme a bit. FUN.


The ones below need only one pastry cutter, a large round, which you use both to cut out the face and to cut out the hair or hat. You can then go to town styling the hair in different ways.

 

 The hair is scored with a knife and hand cut into a 'style'. 

The eyes are tiny hand-rolled white pieces of fondant with even smaller hand-rolled pieces of black fondant. 

The easiest way to position and attach the eyes is to make a pair of indentations using the end of a paintbrush or something similar - you need a tool where the end is rounded and approximately 3mm diameter. Then dab the tiniest drop of water inside the indentation to stick the 'eyeball' in place - too much water and it will come out the side of the 'eyeball' - and no, it doesn't look like tears, it just looks messy. Then press the white fondant into the hold and tap it gently to flatten it. For the pupil, make a tiny indent in the eyeball - be consistent and make it in the same place on each eyeball so you don't get a crosseyed cupcake - and press the black fondant in. It takes a steady hand to position the fondant, I guess you could use a fine pair of tweezers if you have trouble.

The nose is a small hand rolled ball of fondant of the same colour as the face. Make a little hole with the end of your paintbrush in the centre of the face, where you want to position the nose. Then roll the ball of fondant between thumb and forefinger to make it slightly conical. Moisten the narrow end and fasten it into the hole.

Mouths are really tricky to get right. I have found that using the smallest size of circle cutter is the most reliable way to make a nice even smile or frown. 

The simplest expression is a surprised one, like the girl with the ponytail above. The mouth is just a tiny indentation from a sharp pointed tool (if you don't have any pastry tools, a miniature screwdriver set is a good substitute - use the smallest philips head in the set).

The earrings are made of cachous, those silver ball decorations you can get everywhere. Supermarkets seem mostly to sell medium sized cachous, the ones I used here are small ones that came in a 5-part cake decorating shaker with other things like chocolate sprinkles etc. 

Freckles are painted on with a thin paintbrush and brown gel colouring (see previous posts for differences in working with gel as opposed to liquid colourings). 

The cheeks are dusted with an amazing substance that some people call rose petal dust, it is basically a deep pinkish red powder colour that comes in a tiny plastic tube, you get it from cake decorating supply places, about $5 a tube. You mix it with cornflour to dilute the colour and then brush it on with a soft wide brush - like a makeup brush (if you have a clean new one that is). Then you can blow gently on it to remove the excess powder. A really simple tool but it adds a lot to the look of the cupcake. 

How to overdo it

I really liked the idea of puppy cupcakes from the Planet Cake book but when I actually made them I was not so keen.

The designs are fantastic and I got a result I was reasonably happy with, but it took ages - so long that I really didn't want to either eat them or give them away, which kind of defeats the point of a cupcake.

Also, re eating them, there is so much icing involved in the solid figures that you wouldn't WANT to eat them - the balance of icing to cake is just all wrong.

Sorry Paris... I really do like the designs but... just saying.

Dragonflies and piggywigs

Since doing Sally Alps's class and discovering the Planet Cake style of decorating I have been ridiculously Martha Stewart-like, sitting in the kitchen for hours mixing colours and rolling fondant and fiddling around with tiny shapes and cutters.Jade worries that I have become obsessed.

This was the easiest of the PC designs. The dragonfly's body is made up of hand-rolled balls and the wings are done by using a heart cut out with a pastry cutter, then cut in half vertically to get each wing section. The antennae are dried pasta (spaghettini), the book uses florist's wire but I don't like the idea of using non-edible materials.
You could do these in any colour and just mix one batch up, then halve it and add more of the same tint to one half of the batch to get the darker hue for the body of the dragonfly.

I sort of made this up although I have seen similar ones in the past so maybe I subconsciously borrowed the idea. Piggywig is stupidly simple but I really like him.
Use just a single colour tinted to whatever pink you want. One large circle to cover the top of the cupcake, a hand-rolled oval which is flattened and stuck in the middle for the snout, two little black balls pressed flat for eyes and two dots of red colouring put on with a paintbrush for nostrils. When I painted them I wasn't happy with how it looked so I indented them with the rounded end of the paintbrush.
The ears are vaguely triangular hand moulded shapes that are pinched at the sides to make them three dimensional. I dabbed the inside of he ears with painted red colouring but I think this was a mistake.
Cheek blush - I will do a separate post about this soon, really simple and effective technique using stuff called rose petal dust.

Planet Cake, Sally Alps and fondant rolling

 Last November I did my first actual cake decorating course (I have always been totally self taught). It was fantastic and sorted out all sorts of lingering questions I had had about fondant decorating, which I had never been confident to use. I went to Sally Alps of Alps & Amici in Launceston and the course was Christmas Cupcake Decorating. Sally learned her art from the famous Paris of Sydney's Planet Cake. I have since got hold of the new book Planet Cake Cupcakes which is a great buy and very informative.

My eureka moments from the day were:

It is PERFECTLY OK to use commercial or 'ready-to-roll' (RTR) fondant, in fact most great decorators use it! Yay, now I don't have to feel guilty for not making my own fondant icing.

There are a few different types of fondant icing available and you can get it in the supermarket or at places that sell cake decorating supplies. They vary in stiffness and taste so you need to experiment with what works for you. In Coles you can buy Orchard White Icing in a cardboard box from the flour/sugar aisle, this is RTR fondant.I always wondered whether it was or not.

The best colourings are paste or gel colours. The liquid ones that are everywhere get really messy when you try to knead them in because they're too wet. The gel ones are a bit harder to get (go to a cake decorating place) but they give a very intense rich colour and don't make the fondant so sticky. They cost about $5 per colour and it is so worth buying a range of colours so that you can be a bit varied.

Cover the top of the cupcake with a layer of ganache that you can hot-knife so that it is totally smooth - this gives you a beautiful flat surface to work with and means your rolled-out fondant can be quite thin and still be smooth.

Comb good toyshops for kids' modelling tools and rolling pins... this is the perfect scale to use for cupcake sized decorating.


And keep collecting pastry cutters of all shapes and sizes because you can form the basics of lots of cute designs by using the cutters - for instance look at the snowman above which is made from different sized circles.