Other cupcake designs... Native animals and simple flowers

What do you serve when members of the Greens political party are coming to the office for afternoon tea? Well it's simple - cupcakes with bright green icing and some sort of natural environment theme ... Like these possum cupcakes.

 The possum pattern bears more than a passing resemblance to an old Wilderness Society sticker design that read 'Wilderness not woodchips' and had a bright red possum next to the slogan. I always loved the way that the sticker was the shape of the possum's back and tail which formed a perfect circular curve. Those stickers have long disappeared and I could only find a tiny image of one on the webs - I based this possum design on that graphic.

To begin your possum cupcake, cover your ganached cupcake (see earlier posts) with a good bright green coloured fondant. Roll the fondant out and cut it with a large circle cutter - choose a cutter size a bit bigger than the cupcake. Stick it in place with a few drops of water and burnish to make it smooth.












Then roll out some brown fondant and, with a circle cutter a few sizes smaller, cut a circle, a small heart and a tiny diamond. The circle will be the body, the heart will be the head and the diamond will make the ears of the possum.
Starting on the circle, use a cutter another size down to cut a semicircle about 3mm from the edge - this will be the tail - and, at the point this semicircular line finishes on the left side, cut two semi circles as shown to provide the outline of the legs and feet. Discard the rest of the infill area fondant. Trim the fondant in a diagonal line up past the 'front leg'.
Then, using the small heart cutter, cut a heart and hand shape it into a triangle shape, sitcking it on the body point down to make the head.

Cut the tiny diamond out of fondant, then cut this in half and hand shape each half to make a little ear. Stick these on with a drop of water.
Make the eyes - roll two small balls of white fondant, and two smaller balls of black fondant for the pupils. Stick the 'eyeballs' onto the face, about halfway down, with a drop of water (it helps if you make a small dent for each eye and nest the eyeball into the dent). Then make a tiny indentation into the white eyeball and drop the black 'pupil' into it, fixing with a very tiny drop of water.








I experimented and found that these possums are more effective with no nose or mouth. After all the big thing about possums is their huge staring eyes. I think it looks almost more effective if the eyes are slightly uneven. Your possums will look suitably alarmed and slightly mad.

For a bit of variety it's good to throw in some flower cupcakes - this continues the natural theme but brightens up the colour scheme a bit. 

These are the simplest of fondant-iced cupcakes to decorate. You need some circles slightly bigger than the cupcake top, and then some cut out shapes of flowers, hearts or anything else in varying sizes.

These are quick to decorate and can help you to use up colours that you have previously mixed but can't find a use for.

I made these with a pink base and mixed green, blue and yellow flowers.

Enjoy nature and cupcakes together with these environmentally friendly designs!

Shirt and Tie Cupcakes for Parliament Week

As Parliament is sitting this week, it seemed appropriate to dress up a little!

Our pollies are quite fashion conscious and the choice of tie can be crucial. So I did these 'stuffed shirt' cupcakes to take in to work today.


















First I ganached the cupcakes. You start off with a cooled cupcake, and brush it with a little apricot jam diluted with water.

Then you spread it evenly with ganache (a mixture of cream and chocolate, made by pouring boiling cream onto small pieces of chocolate and stirring until it dissolves and becomes a thick, glossy mixture). The ganache needs to 'set' overnight after it is made to make sure it is the right consistency.

Finally, you dip a small metal spatula in boiling water and smooth the top so that no creases, dips or bumps remain. This gives you a completely flat surface to work with.

 For the shirts, I mixed up some pastel coloured RTR fondant using gel colouring (no one wears really bright business shirts).

Each shirt required one large circle, one wide strip, one little square and one tiny strip the same length as the square. This picture shows the quantities for two shirts.

You also need a contrasting fondant colour for the tie, and from this contrasting colour you need to hand cut a tie about 1cm wide at its widest point, and about 6cm long. You also need two small triangles, one .5 cm wide and one 1cm wide. These are not shown in the pic.





Use the big circle to cover the top of the cupcake. Adhere it with a few drops of water and burnish the top with a piece of flexible plastic, or a small cake smoother, to make the surface absolutely smooth and even.

Fold the wider strip in half lengthways and shape it into a horseshoe, or open-ended circle. This will be the collar of the shirt.









Using a little water on its base, stick the collar onto the top of the shirt.

Then stick the square piece of fondant onto the right side of the cupcake with a tiny drop of water, and stick the little strip across its top with an even smaller amount of water. This will be the shirt pocket.

Using a large needle or a small pointed working tool, prick tiny holes around the edges of the square to imitate stitching on the pocket.

Make the tie from a contrasting colour. You will need to hand-cut the ties, using a tapering oval shape as the base. Make them a little longer than the space between the bottom of the collar and the edge of the cupcake, and when positioning them, bend or fold them up a little so that they are more three dimensional.

For the knot in the tie, cut a tiny triangle out of rolled fondant in the same colour as the tie. Stick this over the top of the tie.

Try to tuck the little corners into the edges of the collar for extra realism :-)

Then cut another triangle, slightly bigger, to make a handkerchief for the shirt pocket. Stick this in place.

Stripey ties are really effective!

For stripes, roll out one colour as your base, to about 4mm thick (slightly thicker than you want it to end up). Lay this aside and cover it with plastic to stop it drying out.

Then take a second colour and roll it out slightly thinner. Cut long thin strips (2mm) from this, using a ruler and a sharp knife. 

Lay the strips across the base colour, making sure they are parallel. Then position your rolling pin and roll firmly in the direction of the strips.

You can then use your new 'stripey' colour to create fashionable ties for your stuffed shirts!



 Happy parliament week!

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).
.

 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. 

Toadstools, playing cards and halloween

These are designs I made up (as opposed to my usual practice of stealing designs from Planet Cake and the interwebs).
 

I got the idea for the toadstools from some tiny little sugar toadstools that I found at The Mill Providore in Launceston ages ago. I planned to use them but then thought it might be more effective if I made my own toadstools out of fondant, so that the texture would be consistent with the green 'grass' they were on.

The stalk is a small cone of white fondant rolled in the palm of your hand. The top of the toadstool is a hemisphere of red fondant that is hollowed out inside - you can press a fingertip into it to hollow it.

I also used the end of a small paintbrush to indent a small hollow in the underside of the red piece, so that you can 'nest' the stem into it and provide a more secure join. Moisten the join with a drop of water to make it stick fast.

I used white hundreds and thousands for the toadstool's spots.

 I thought that playing cards would be really effective and simple, but they were harder than I thought and I wasn't happy with the result. I am not very good at painting on letters, and my cutters to make the hearts and spades weren't really in proportion to the size of the 'playing card'.

A better idea might be to do the whole top of the cupcake in white, and just paint the letter and stick the hearts/spades directly onto it.

 It's really annoying when the cupcake wrapper starts to pull away from the cake and won't stick back on - it looks messy and I haven't found a way to stop it happening.

I think they would be more effective as a big group, but the colours are quite harsh and 'un-food-like' which bothers me a bit. FAIL.















While I was on poisonous substances and gambling, I thought I'd detour to Halloween and show you some quick and dirty mini cupcakes I made a while back, non fondant decorated but you could easily do these from fondant:

The icing was a plain chocolate buttercream for the pumpkin ones and a plain white glace icing (just icing sugar and water) for the skulls.

The pumpkins were hand cut from rolled marzipan that had been coloured orange - I used liquid colourings because I hadn't yet discovered gel colourings.

I got lazy with the skulls and used plastic favours that I bought from a party shop. I hate using non edible stuff on cakes but I was in a hurry and couldn't work out how to make them. If I did these again I would try to make them from white fondant.

I guess if you were dedicated you could make a mould from these plastic ones and use the mould to make sugar skulls??

Anyone got any other ideas for Halloween?

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.

In the beginning...

... I was a small girl with a sweet tooth and a cookbook which contained a recipe for fairy cakes. The recipe told you how to mix flour and sugar and eggs together and scrape this mixture into patty cans.

It also said: "Ask Mummy to set the oven to Gas Mark 8."
... and so I did, and she did, and my first batch of cupcakes appeared all hot and fresh from the oven.

Then it said somewhat scarily "Be careful not to eat them when they're still hot, or you may get hiccups."
... I have still never figured out if this is true.

From then on I loved making cakes and I still do. I'm a pretty lazy cook, I only do stuff that I'm interested in, and the only thing I am consistently interested in is baked treats. So that is the focus of this blog in which I'm going to try to document my experiments with cakes, pastries and biscuits. I like to read and see what other cooks are doing or have tried to do, and I often turn to the interwebs to solve cooking problems so hopefully I can help others to do that too!