Sean the Sheep Cupcakes

This would be a perfect present for any stray New Zealanders you come across ahaha... sorry.

I was trying to come up with a design for Will Tatchell who runs Van Dieman Brewing.
I wondered about a beer cupcake but I wasn't sure how to do it, so in the end I fixed on Sean the Sheep because Will's brewery is on a farming property, and there is a sheep that was bottlefed who follows him around.

For Sean's head I looked at an old Wallace and Gromit alarm clock. Jade was confused to find it on the kitchen table but guessed straight away that it was possibly cupcake related.

The green background (left) works better than the purple one below because it looks like grass. The cachous were just to glam it up a bit but were possibly a mistake.

It would also be fun to do a more three dimensional Sean by modelling half of his body and making it look as if he was jumping out of the cupcake.

My problem though with that type of solid modelling is that you end up with so much icing relative to the amount of cake, it's not really edible.

Baa-aaaa, happy eating Will.

ssss

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.