Well, Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, so I wanted to share some photos of Valentine’s cupcakes that my sister and I came up with. Some of the photos are from cupcakes I did last year, but most of them are new. Later this week I will be giving a demo on how some of them are done. I would definitely love to know which one is your favorite, so if you have time leave me a comment and let me know!
Thanks for checking them out!
Well, I survived this week, but barely…I just finished catering a wedding for 200 people!!! I did the wedding cake and all the appetizers (pictures will be up soon). This was my first time catering a wedding for so many people and boy was it a lot of work. I was absolutely exhausted, but I thought that I owed my loyal blogger friends a good post and another giveaway, so here it is!!! For this tutorial I thought I would show you how to make easy sugar flowers that are simply gorgeous. You just need a few tools of the trade and your flowers will turn out beautifully. The giveaway book, Sweet & Simple Party Cakes, by May Clee Cadman has a lot of great photos and techniques for decorating cakes and I thought that this book in particular would be a great tool for any baker/cake decorator to have. So to enter the random drawing for the book just leave a comment before Wednesday night and you will be entered. Good luck!
So to start off making these flower decorations you need to mix together 50% fondant and 50% gumpaste. The fondant helps with the smoothness and the gumpaste helps you to be able to roll out the dough very thin and it also allows the dough to harden quicker.
Then you can color the dough any color you would like. Next roll the dough out on a flat surface with a little cornstarch to prevent sticking. You need to roll it out very thin so that you have nice, delicate petals…about 1/8″-1/16″. Then instead of using a petal cutter you can free hand some petals of your own. Just use a sharp small knife or an exacto knife and cut out some teardrop shapes about 3/4″-1″ tall.
Next you need to take each petal and use a balling tool to thin out the edges of the petals and give them a more realistic shape. You do this by placing the petal on a soft surface and gently rubbing the tool back and forth. (As you might notice in my pictures I didn’t have my balling tool with me, but this tool did the same job basically) Now if you don’t have this tool try using the back of a spoon to achieve the same effect.
Now you need to continue doing this to all five petals for the base layer. Place some plastic wrap or paper towels on a concave surface, like a tiny bowl, to create the forming shape for the petals. Lay each petal down, overlapping slightly and adhering them to one another with a dab of water. You can also use the aide of tiny pieces of paper towel or plastic wrap to help create the dips and curves of the petals while they are drying.
After the base five petals are down cut some more and thin them out too. Then place the next row of flowers on top. You can use your judgement with how many petals to add, but always do it in odd numbers…it makes the flower look more realistic. Again, use the aide of paper towels or plastic wrap to help give your flower realistic curves with it is drying.
To finish off the flower, cut a small round circle out and thin it out just as you would a petal. Place it in the center of your flower and as always adhere it with a little water. Now let you flower dry until it is completely hard…a couple hours or overnight.
Once the flower dried I used different colors of luster dust to give it a more realistic look and because Iike the shiny look of it. Just dust on the luster or petal dust however you want, but be minimal…you can always add more, but you can’t take it off. I then tried two different centers…for one center I brushed yellow luster dust and then added one single pink dragee. For the other center, I put one sugar pearl and added more yellow luster dust to make it look like it had pollen on it.
Now just place your flower decoration on top of a cute cupcake and enjoy your beautiful creation!
So sorry it has taken me so long to announce the winner…life is busy as normal. But before I congratulate the winner I want to say a big THANK YOU to everyone who participated in the contest. I was absolutely blown away with how many people left comments. Not only did I get a lot of comments, I got really nice comments…THANKS!!! I was so happy with this last cookbook giveaway that next week I will be doing another one so make sure and check back with me. Well, I have delayed enough…the winner from the random drawing is MANDY SESSLER!!! Congratulations Mandy! Please email me your address and I will send the book off to you so you can start the baking!
Today my friend from pastry school is having her 40th birthday party and she asked me to help out. For the dessert she wanted cupcakes of course. She said she wanted to keep it simple so we went with vanilla cupcakes with chocolate mousse buttercream and chocolate cupcakes with Chockylit’s cream cheese frosting (aka Vanilla Bean Frosting). Both of these are simple delicious! The vanilla cupcakes I tried for the first time are from Vanilla Bakeshop. They gave the recipe away on the Martha Stewart show and I knew I had to try it. The chocolate mousse buttercream is from Sticky, Chewy, Messy, Gooey which is a fantastic book that I recommend. This is probably my favorite chocolate frosting right now…definitely worth a try.
As you can see I topped the pearls with little balls of goodness! On the chocolate mousse buttercream I sprinkled Pearlized Ivory Dragees from Surfas. On the cream cheese frosting I sprinkled Valrhona Chocolate Pearls from Surfas too (You can also get them at a lot of Whole Foods too). These are a fun topping that also taste delicious!
This past week has been full of baking, baking, and more baking, so look forward to many posts this coming week. The first of many posts is probably my favorite! This past weekend I had the pleasure of making more treats for my friend Karrie’s second bridal shower. This time the shower was in San Diego, CA and it was at Tea Upon Chatsworth. I had never been to a tea house before and had an absolutely wonderful time. Tea and yummy treats…what could be better! I was asked to make about 40 bridal shower favors for the ladies and decided that trying out mini cakes was the route I was going to take. My wonderful friend April from culinary school came over to help me with the project, but when midnight came she had to leave and that left me to finish them…lets just say that my head didn’t hit the pillow until around 4:30am…I don’t think I would’ve finished without April! I do have to say that I still ended up having a lovely day at the shower, even on 2 1/2 hours sleep, and I was pretty happy with how my little cakes turned out. The circle cakes were chocolate cake with chocolate mousse buttercream and fresh strawberries and the square cakes were buttermilk cake with passion fruit mousse and fresh strawberries. I took photos at my house and also at the shower, so sorry for the overload of photos, but I love taking pictures of my goodies…please let me know your favorite photo, so I can see which one I should put on my official website!
To make them I baked the cake in 13 x 9 pans and then used cookie cutters to cut circles out of the cooled cake. I used a serrated bread knife to make the squares out of the other cake. One I had enough cut outs for each cake to have two layers I piped on a outer ring of vanilla buttercream with a piping bag on the bottom layer and then piped in the filling for the cakes and added the sliced strawberries. Next I placed the second cake layer on top and piped buttercream around the cake before I smoothed it down. Piping the buttercream on the mini cakes is easier than trying to frost them completely with only a offset spatula because the cakes are not as stable as larger ones. After covering the cakes with buttercream I rolled out fondant, I prefer using Satin Ice Fondant, and smoothed it over the cakes. (Side note: I am really happy with Satin Ice Fondant and got many compliments on how the fondant tasted…since many people have a mad mindset about it. Also I have tried marshmallow fondant, but found that I didn’t like the consistency as much as regular fondant…so I’m sticking with Satin Ice). After the fondant is on the cake and smoothed I use a pizza wheel to go around the bottom edge of the cake and cut off the excess.
I then adhered different color ribbon around the bottom of each cake with a dab of buttercream. I also piped three small dots of buttercream at the seam of the ribbon and then adhered three silver dragees to the buttercream dots.
For a decorating accent I rolled out some gray fondant and then stamped the flower design onto the fondant and lust dusted the whole mini cake. As you can see in the photos I used three different flower stamps on the fondant. (For more info about these kind of stamps check out my other posts on cupcakes). I then used circle cookie cutters to cut out neat circles and adhered them to the cake with a dab of water. To package the mini cakes I used 4″x4″x4″ clear boxes, which you can get from Garnish, and tied them with different color ribbons. On some of the boxes I cut fresh button mums and stuck them underneath the ribbon.
And lastly here are some more photos from the shower that were too fun not to post…hope you enjoy them!
