Halloween Cupcakes 2: Gingerbread Gravestones

My Halloween efforts this year stretched to two designs (for the other, please see previous post).

I loved the look of the gingerbread gravestone cupcakes in Ms Lili Vanilli's book A Zombie Ate My Cupcake, so I wanted to try them.

Now, this is the point where I go all Martha Stewart on you, and tell you how I painstakingly made my gingerbread gravestones from scratch, lovingly combining the fresh raw ingredients into a dough and carefully rolling it out.... cutting out my shapes and laying them flat on the baking tray all ready to be popped into a hot oven....

Actually no. What I used were these hideous supermarket freaks. So there.


(Okay, okay... if you REALLY want to be a perfectionist, you'll find a good gingerbread recipe and instructions for rolling and cutting it in my previous post on making gingerbread houses, here.)

 And so began the Great Gingerbread Man Massacre of Halloween 2012. Both of the horrible 'Gingerbread Kids' with their garish packets and their uneven gingerbready skintone and their cheap, nasty cracked-Smartie buttons were unceremoniously hacked to pieces - very specific pieces, as you see at the top of this pic.

The curved arms were perfect for domed gravestones (I cut them with a point at the bottom so I would have something to anchor them in the icing with) while the cross-shaped gravestones required a little more freehand work.

Two smallish gingerbread figures yielded me five crosses, four domes and heaps of leftover, hacked-up gingerbread pieces. I was too snobby to eat the leftovers. I only eat HOME MADE gingerbread, of course :)

There was a delicious (haw haw) irony in having to dismember poor little innocent gingerbread men in order to make macabre death-themed cupcakes.

The next stage was to decorate the gingerbread gravestones.

This was easily achieved with a very thick mixture of royal icing and a piping bag with the very end of it snipped to create a tiny piping hole.

There wasn't a lot of decoration I could do for the crosses because they were too thin. In the end I settled for a simple cross of white icing to emphasise their shape and provide a bit of contrast.

For my experiments with this batch of cupcakes and their icing, see my previous post here.

I used the piped, cream-coloured ones and smoothed out the piping texture a bit with a spatula, seeing it wasn't quite even anyway, to get a slightly less bumpy surface.

I sieved cocoa over the top to look like earth...

Stuck little florist wires into the bases of my gravestones to provide them with an anchor into the cupcake....

And pushed the gravestones into their final resting place... the soft, cocoa-covered earth.

They made a suitably macabre top for my Halloween centrepiece!

A short note: I decorated these the night before I used them, and sealed them into a cupcake carrier with a load of fresh baked savour muffins and the 'severed ear' cupcakes. All were cool and dry, but by the morning the container had fogged up, and my suspicions proved correct when I tested the gingerbread and found it had gone very soft in that environment. It would have been better to leave them to air dry overnight. However, within half an hour of being taken out of the container, they had hardened up again.

The finished Halloween centrepiece.....

Happy Halloween (again) from Dr Cupcake!

 

 

 

 

Halloween Cupcakes 1: Severed Ears

Halloween is the season for ghosts and ghoulies and long-leggedy beasties... it is also the time for macabre creativity in the domain of cupcakes....

....like these SEVERED EAR cupcakes!!!

Now I have to admit to something here: my creative Halloween juices had barely started flowing (arterially spurting??) before I chanced upon this amazing book. Yes indeed! A Zombie Ate My Cupcake, by Lily Vanilli, absolutely full of ghoulishly shocking designs!!

So I have to admit that I got derailed on this one, and both of my Halloween cupcake offerings this year are from designs by the amazing Ms Vanilli.

I decided I HAD to try some severed ears as a topping for a cupcake. Van Gogh would have been proud. So the first step, obviously, was to come up with some ears:

Ms Vanilli does not include detailed instructions of how to make ears, so I started with the obvious decision....

... Take a photo of my OWN ear. I needed to use SOMETHING as a model. If you'd like to use my ear too, you're welcome - ear modelling comes for free from Dr Cupcake.

The next step was to mix up some shell-pink, ear-coloured fondant icing.
For instructions on how to mix gel colouring into fondant, click here.

Then I pulled off a small piece, about the size of a walnut, and rolled it into an oval shape.

I then hollowed this out with my finger....

... gradually creating a rim around the right-hand edge and a deepening curve in the centre.

I used the rounded end of a small plastic fork (but you could use anything similar) to help me get the rim all rounded and hollowed out.

So you then end up with something a bit like this:

From here, I started to try to copy the contours in the inner ear from the picture of my own ear. This was quite tricky.

Each ear turned out a little differently, but basically this was the finished product, which then just needed to be left somewhere dry and shady to harden up.

This shows you how the ears all ended up slightly different to each other. The one on the right is HIDEOUS, isn't it? Sorry 'bout that.

I then decorated three out of the six ears with little silver studs. I wanted to also make some little gold rings, but I didn't think I would be able to make them of fondant without them looking a bit clumsy so I just went with the 'plain' look for the other ears.

Having done the ears and left them to dry (I left them to air dry for a few days, but they would have been fine to use within an hour or so) I needed some cupcakes, of course.

I haven't used a 'cupcake mix' since I was about 12, but I had a special purpose for trying this one: it is both gluten-free and dairy-free, and several of the intended recipients needed this to be the case. My experiments with doing my own recipes for these dietary requirements are a little haphazard, so I did think I would try Macro's Gluten Free Cupcake Mix (pictured).

All that needed to be added were two eggs and a couple of tablespoons of vegetable oil. As you see this produces a light fluffy pale-coloured mix. Uncooked, it tasted okay, although it was disturbingly textured - almost gritty, in the way that rice flour can be.

I should have taken a pic of the cupcakes as they came out of the oven but I forgot. Anyway, they were better than I expected: they cooked evenly, rose smoothly and tasted nice, and were very light, in the way that shop-bought cupcakes made with confectioners' flour often are.

The packet icing mix which was also gluten and dairy free (when made up with Nuttelex or a vegetable based margarine) is the yellowish, loosely-piped icing in this picture. I found it only made enough icing for seven cupcakes....

...So I had to improvise with the rest, and, goddammit, I had no icing sugar in the house...

I substituted with royal icing. This produced an ultra smooth, glossy icing that (warning, Will Robinson, warning) tends to start off quite hard and goes softer, and has a tendency to run off the edges of the cupcake, as you see in one of the cupcakes above.

This horribly blurry picture shows the next stage: attaching the ears to the top of the cupcakes.

Of course, severed ears need some blood, and some glossy gel icing in the appropriate colour was just the ticket.

I really just placed the ears on top of the cupcakes rather than 'attaching' them. I squirted 'blood' all down the side of the ear, then freehanded some little blood trails in the icing, just for extra shock value.

They made for an impressively bloody Halloween centrepiece!

Happy Halloween from Dr Cupcake!!

Halloween cupcakes with sugar skulls

Ever since last Halloween, when I used PLASTIC skull favours to decorate cupcakes (here) and felt dirty for doing it, I have been thinking of how to make edible skulls for these rich but sinister little cupcakes.

The interior of the cupcake is a chocolate mud cake rich in shortening, sugar and chocolate and light on flour. I used gluten free flour too, because increasingly people are experiencing gluten intolerance and this makes cakes more accessible for many of my friends.

 The sugar skulls were cast from plasticine moulds using a convenient blingy skull necklace that I had to hand. Neither the casting medium nor the object from which the cast was taken were ideal, but after a full month searching for a plastic skull of the right size (like the ones I THREW AWAY last year) and some high quality DAS hard-drying modelling material (like my Dad sold for 20 years on end in his toyshop) I gave up on both and used the only things I had to hand. Considering the materials I had to work with, I was really pleased with the result.

So I pressed my little skull necklace into some kids' plasticine that promised to be 'air-drying'. 

My first task after that was to dig through the toolbox for the superglue and retrieve and glue back the diamante decorations that had been pulled out of my little skull by the plasticine (I told you it was blingy). 

The plasticine was not as air-drying as I would have liked but it was adequate. The sugar mix recipe is here. 

After pressing the sugar into the mould, I immediately unmoulded it, repeating the process about 20 times and dusting the mould with cornflour each time to prevent sticking. 

The unmoulding process was not without its dramas. The mould had to be tapped firmly onto a waiting piece of cardboard, then gently trimmed at the edges to clean up unwanted grains.

...As I said, the unmoulding process was not without its problems. 

But within an hour I had a set of sweet little sugar skulls resting on a baking tray. The differences were interesting - I made two moulds, so you'd expect two sets of identical skulls, but there was a bit of variation in how well the sugar stuck to the molds, and how I trimmed the unmoulded pieces. 

I left them to dry in a warm place for 24 hours to firm up. 

Next for the actual cupcakes. I had planned to make full size cupcakes, but the skulls were small in comparison to that surface area so I elected to make mini cupcakes, thinking that the decoration would be more proportionate. 

As noted above I used a rich chocolate mud mixture, but you could use any type of cake. 

I've talked before about the importance of good baking tins, with some thickness. I had two mini cupcake baking trays of exactly the same size, so I nested them one inside the other, using only the top one for the cupcakes. This provides an extra insulation layer for small cakes that can otherwise burn easily. 

After baking, I brushed them with a watered-down and strained apricot jam syrup, to retain the moisture inside them - not necessary, but it makes them last longer. 

Then, to get a smooth-as-silk surface for my fondant decoration, I ganached the tops of the cupcakes, pressing ganache into all the small bumps and cracks to end up with a perfectly smooth surface. This lets you use a very thin layer of fondant while still achieving a smooth surface. 

Next came the fondant covering. I used black fondant, coloured with black gel colouring (tip: wear latex gloves when mixing it up). Then I rolled it out thin and cut circles with a cutter a little bigger than the surface of the cupcake. 

Attaching the fondant circle to the top of the cupcake with a few drops of water, I burnished it with some clear acrylic like in this picture. This smoothes the top perfectly and gently pushes the edges of the fondant down to meet the edge of the paper liner. 

This is the production line showing the next three stages. 

On the bottom right is a fondant-covered cupcake. Next it is sprayed with a clear food lacquer (amazing product and worth the money); then a small dot of royal icing is piped or dotted in the middle of the glossed cupcake, to act as adhesive for the skull. Finally the skull is gently placed in the centre. 

The scale of the mini cupcake was effective for the size of the skull. 

I had a few more cupcakes than skulls, so to finish off, I made some Halloween toadstool rings with some little sugar toadstools that I've had for some time (not home made). 

My Eureka moments in making Halloween Skull Cupcakes: 

• Diamantes are easy to lose if they fall into the carpet. 
• If you're cooking gluten-free, make sure you grease and flour cake tins, and flour moulds, with gluten free flour as well. Don't make your friends hate you. 
• Be careful with fan forced ovens because they always cook a bit quicker than you're prepared for. 
• If you drop a full glass bottle of blackberry cordial on a tile floor in the middle of baking, allow an extra hour for clean up. 
• Try to be extra careful not to get cornflour (for rolling our your fondant) onto the top surface of black fondant because it is very difficult to remove. 

Happy Halloween everybody!!!

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?