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!!

A Collingwood FC cake for a football-mad boss

No one who knows my boss (or for that matter, any of his relatives) could doubt that he is football-mad. Not only was he rather a good player in the State league, he has a lifelong, mad allegiance to the Collingwood Football Club. Unfortunately, Collingwood (despite its passionate fan base) is the most unpopular club in the history of Australian competition, so when it came to the boss's birthday, I had an extremely difficult decision to make...

...Could I quell my own distaste for his hideous team....

... In order to make him happy with a Collingwood-themed birthday cake??

Well, clearly, it turns out that I could, and did. Many doubted my sanity, but I pushed onward, and tried not to think of all the Collingwood supporters leering at my cake with their gappy-toothed smiles and their jailhouse tattoos.

First I needed a model for the dreaded Collingwood logo, so I turned to the interwebs for that. I tried to find the clearest graphic that I could:

Then I needed to start with the basics - this is a chocolate mud cake coated with chocolate ganache and hot-knifed to be absolutely smooth.

For detailed instructions on that process, click here. (The link relates to ganaching cupcakes, but the process is the same for larger cakes.)

I then rolled a large sheet of white fondant icing and covered the cake's top and sides entirely with it, trimming the base carefully.

Now it was time to get to work on the detail. I cut two wavy triangles for the two flags at the base of the logo. The black-and-white Collingwood flag was fairly easy, but this one - the Australian flag - was fiddly.

I started with the Union Jack in the corner and then drew the outlines of the stars. Then I coloured in the rest in blue. I used food grade (non toxic) textas - the cheapest and easiest way to get these is to go to a good toyshop and ask for non toxic, washable children's markers. Crayola is fine for food colouring and works well.

I cut a tiny shield from rolled white fondant and printed the requisite foundation date of the Club (as neatly as I could - it's not easy to print neat letters with a soft nibbed texta onto soft-surfaced findant).

This picture shows several of the elements of the logo together: you can see the flag shapes partially cropped from the picture at the bottom, still unpainted, the shield shape, not yet printed, the wheat sheaves to go on the sides and the main oval plaque. I cut out all of the shapes first and put them together loosely so I could work out whether the basic proportions were right.

White-on-black lettering is harder than black-on-white, because you must first draw hollow letter shapes, then colour carefully around them. You can see this process underway in this picture.

The magpie in the centre was a hand drawn equivalent of the one on the logo - it could have been better but it was ok for this purpose. I copied it as closely as I could from the picture because the trick with this kind of cake is to be as accurate as you can.

The finished logo was assembled from each individual piece after each had been coloured/lettered. I used a very small amount of water to stick the pieces together - you need to be really careful when using water near colourings, as the cake's surface was pure white, and there is always a danger that the colours may run - you have been warned.

Presentation of the cake was somewhat delayed, as the boss was out of the office on the actual day, with a shocking feverish cold. We got it couriered to his house where it managed to put a smile on his face - and even better, he brought the remains of it back to work the next day, so we all got a chance to COMPLETELY DESTROY the Collingwood logo in a ceremonial, knife-wielding way!


Happy footballing from Dr Cupcake!

Chocolate cake leftovers can be fun!

If you ever make a cake or a batch of cupcakes and there is some mixture left over, here's a great tip:

Dr Cupcake's Great Cake Tip #43: NEVER THROW EXTRA MIXTURE AWAY.

Take the Wombles as your role model. If you are as old as me then you'll know that the Wombles, while they were underground, overground, wombling free, were ALSO making good use of the things that they find, the things that the everyday folk leave behind:

Yes indeed. And I bet they were fond of chocolate cake (although I can't say that for sure), and further, I bet you anything you like that, had they had extra cake mixture left over from a batch, they would have turned it into a smaller tin, cooked it, and come out with something..... looking rather like this:

.... looking rather like this:

- Which they would have put in the freezer, slightly flat and unattractive-looking as it was, in the certain knowledge that, ONE DAY SOON, it would find a use.

The Wombles, whilst whipping up a batch of ganache for their last cooking project, and finding that there appeared to be too much ganache for their purposes, would, almost certainly, have done.....

....THIS, and scooped it unattractively into a sandwich bag, to be popped in the freezer for a later event.

And this is exactly what you and I should do, too.....

Because, the very next time you have a special occasion and absolutely no time to make anything fancy, you can rip your little flat cake and your messy ganache out of the freezer and do this with it, and no one will ever know that you haven't slaved over a hot stove for hours making it.

These are, obviously, little squares of rich chocolate mud cake topped with a warm, half-melted ganache and topped with some fancy sugar roses.....

.... Which I had no compunction in getting out of a packet - again, if you have the time, it's wonderful to make them yourself, but if you don't, it is really worthwhile to keep a few ready made ones in the cupboard.

I hand cut the cake squares with a sharp and heavy knife. It helps if the cake is not completely defrosted, or at least still very cold, when cutting - that way it is less crumbly and less likely to break into smaller pieces.

The good thing about the 'dolloped' ganache icing is that it hides any inconsistencies or breakages in the cake squares.

I was lucky enough to have both red and white roses to top the cakes with. The red were my favorites.

And seriously one of the best things about the whole experience was the amount of washing up that I had to do at the end, which was:











Done, finito, from go to whoa in approximately 20 minutes ... and a roomful of appreciative chocolate smeared faces were none the wiser.

So, be like the Wombles, because they're cool and stuff.

Happy wombling from Dr Cupcake!