Kids DIY cupcakes at Festivale

At Festivale this year there was a wonderful stall in the kids area which can best be described as 'DIY Cupcakes'.

You paid your four bucks and got to choose one of about 8 patterns. You then were given a plain undecorated cupcake, you took this to the 'buttercream station' with your chosen pattern and they dolloped the right colour of buttercream on your cupcake...

... giving you an icy pole stick to spread it, and a little bag of pre-cut decorating items like marshmallows and licorice. 

The picture shows my chosen pattern which was a very cute bunny with scary black whiskers. 

So I took great pleasure smoothing my buttercream to the smoothest smoothness possible and sticking on the little bits 'n bobs of decorating things... the result I achieved was pretty much what the picture indicated... if anything the whiskers were scarier than advertised. :-/

I undertook this activity with two small friends of the O'Byrne variety who were equally as excited as me at making their cupcakes, and equally careful in their decorating skills. 

In fact they had the jump on me because their little fingers were the right size to handle the tiny ingredients. 

 I loved this design of two teddies marooned on a desert island, complete with a cocktail umbrella to protect their delicate teddybear fur from the hot sun. They look pretty happy with their tropical paradise.

The happy trio with their decorating efforts.

Their mum, my friend Michelle, tells me that this DIY cupcakery idea is starting to take off at little people's parties... there is a whole scene out there that I have been unaware of up until now!!

Thanks girls for sharing your DIY cupcaking experience with me and thanks Michelle for the photo!

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?

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.