Cupcakes Two Ways - Part Two

Hello again!

We're back with the thrilling conclusion of Cupcakes Two Ways! Our spine-tingling adventure started over here in part one, so be sure you've read that first. There's a lot of character development and drama and such in that first part, and, well, if you go and read this one first it's just going to spoil the whole thing.

So, if you've read part one, you know I'm a great big over-dramatic liar. There's that character development I mentioned.

Oh, and also I baked two kinds of cupcakes, and now it's time to frost and decorate them!

I am sorry this picture is so dark. Sometimes in the passion of baking, I forget where my light source is. Oops.

I am again sort of stealing from Bakerella - so poke this link here for her cream cheese frosting recipe. I only did a half recipe because by the time I was done baking the cupcakes, and my brother came by to visit, 4 un-decorated cupcakes had mysteriously disappeared. (The silver white cake only made 10 cupcakes, by the way, in case you're a stickler for math.)

In any case, I blitzed together the cream cheese and butter, above, then added my vanilla, below.

There's that spoon again! All together now: "D'aaaaaaaw!"

Yes, I'll get over the spoons eventually. Give me time.

Next, sift your icing sugar in a separate bowl to sort out any lumps, and add it bit by bit to your cream cheese mixture, blending all the way.

I must say, I was baffled when I first read this frosting recipe. Never, ever have I made a frosting that didn't include a liquid of any kind. No egg, no water, no milk, just fat, sugar and flavor. Part of me feared it wouldn't turn out well, but a much bigger part of me said to trust Bakerella.

And I'm so glad I did. This frosting, you guys. It is so good!

Next up, decorations! I hit my local bulk foods store and basically brought home anything and everything that I thought even might look decent on Valentine's Day cupcakes.

Clockwise from top left: Wilton sugar pearls, large heart sprinkles, pink sanding sugar, and tiny heart sprinkles. But oh, we're not done.

Clockwise from top left: Cinnamon hearts (oh goodness, my favourite!) sour gummy hearts, Valentine's Day Smarties (the chocolate kind) and regular gummy hearts.

It's fun time.

Friend Shanahan had suggested making a 'cloud' of frosting and popping two heart candies on top, I believe because when you're in love, your heart feels light as air. Or something.

Anyway it looked super cute! Now all I can think of is that Phil Collins song, what was it? "Two hearts, sitting on just one cupcake" or something like that.

But it was still missing something...

Tiny heart sprinkles fix everything.

Now, let me tell you, when I first sat down to sort through my photos for this post, I had over 80 pictures, just for the frosting & decorating step. I think I'm getting a little snap-happy with the camera. I eventually was able to cull all but my very favourite cupcakes to show you. This was very, very difficult to do, they were all so cute!

A simple spiral of cream cheese frosting piped on with a large star tip, with a simple pattern of Smarties over the top. I don't care what day of the year it is, more chocolate = more better!

Just one heart gummy atop a cupcake. It would be lonely if not for all the tiny heart sprinkles. Maybe I went a little sprinkle-happy, too.

On the silver white cake, since I still had quite a bit of frosting left, instead of making a new flavor, I just tinted the existing frosting pink. I do wish I'd had some kind of strawberry extract on hand because that would have been just extra special, but I didn't think of that at the bulk store. Next time.

So uh, there's a cupcake with pink cream cheese frosting and two sour gummy hearts. (See, berry flavor would have gone great with the gummies. Hindsight is 20/20, and all that.)

This one has a thick layer of pink cream cheese frosting with a simple pattern of sugar pearls and white heart sprinkles. I am probably ill-proportionately proud of it, but that's still not as proud as I was of this next one:

Anyone who's a big fan of Amanda over at I am Baker may notice a similarity here to her famous Rose Cake, and I freely admit it certainly took inspiration from her cake, though I hadn't read that post in ages. Reading it over again afterwards did give me some more ideas, though... but I'll be saving those for another day.

It should go without saying, but if you're not already reading I am Baker, Bakerella and Bakingdom, guys, you really should be. Fantastic blogs. Just don't compare mine to them because, well, I tried it and then I got kind of sad.

Know what cheers me up when I get sad?

Looking at pretty cupcakes. Awww, yeah.

I would definitely do this again. I highly recommend the 'buy every candy that looks good and throw it on cupcakes' method of decorating, especially if you have kids who want to help in the kitchen. Would also be super fun at a party, set out your icing and sprinkles and just let people go nuts.

I know they're not the fanciest cupcakes in the world but they were a tonne of fun to make - and even more fun to eat. Now the question is, how am I going to top these for V-Day itself?

You'll just have to keep an eye out for the next post to find out.

Until next time!

Crafted in Fine Marble, Part Two: The Frostening

Hello again. If you haven't yet checked out my Crafted in Fine Marble post, please go do so now! This post will still be here when you get back.

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Okay? You've read it? Okay great. So, now that the cakes are marbled, baked and thoroughly cooled, it is time to frost 'em up! By the way, I do mean thoroughly cooled. If these babies are the least bit warm the frosting is going to slide right off them. My cakes spent the night in the fridge so they were more than ready to go.

The bad news is I slept in that day - I was still fighting off that awful cold - and I didn't have a ton of time to decorate before people started arriving. I'm sorry to say I did rush these a bit.

I trimmed the top to be as level as possible, then set to decorating. The first challenge I had was figuring out a way to frost the bottom of the giant cupcake cake. Trying to slather it on with an offset spatula like a regular cake did not work at all. I eventually settled on using a large petal tip - one that was approximately the size of each ridge on the cupcake - and proceeded to ice like so:

So, two things I should have done differently: I should have waited until the sides were done before frosting the top. My concern was that frosting the top afterwards would mess up the sides, but doing it first meant the frosting firmed up too much before I put the top on.

Thing two, because I was rushing a bit, I wasn't totally consistent in my technique. The ridges in the above pic are pretty even, but around the rest of the cake I started getting a bit sloppy. The 'fat' part of the petal tip should always align with the raised part of the ridge so as not to accidentally fill in the gap and ruin the ridged effect. I, uh, I might have done that in a couple of spots.

Live & learn!

So once I had the bottom frosted all around, I plopped the trimmed top bit in place and realised my other mistake. I really should have tinted that middle frosting to match the top or bottom of the cake. Oops again. I did what I could to mask the white showing through.

By the way, I swear on all that is sugary that someday I am going to buy a microwave stand, and you'll know when it happens because my pictures will suddenly, magically be uncluttered!

I'm not kidding when I say I'm a Baker in the Basement, you guys, and my kitchen counter space is exceedingly limited, but you just watch. The day of the microwave stand will come.

Uh... sorry, got a little off-track there. Back to the cake!

Using a large round decorating tip, I followed the natural swirl of the cupcake top and tried to get as even a layer as I could. If it's not perfect at this point fret not.

Although, you can fret just a little if, like mine, your clock shows that guest will be arriving soon and you haven't even started decorating the second cake. Eep.

So the reason you don't have to be perfect with the first pass of top frosting is because you're going to smoosh it with a spoon a bit to even it out anyway. I wanted it to look like someone had smeared the frosting on with a giant spatula.

I think it turned out pretty okay for my very first giant cupcake! Anyone who follows my Twitter account (Follow over here, if you're interested!) probably saw me say there would be giant fondant sprinkles on this. And there would have been, except my white fondant apparently was not packaged as air-tightly as I'd thought, and it sort of dried out. And by 'sort of dried out' I mean was completely as hard as a rock. So silver dragées became the main decoration instead.

This worked out since my buddy is a big Doctor Who fan, and the Tenth Doctor once ranted about how fascinating these 'edible ball bearings' were. So she appreciated them on her cake.

Speaking of fandoms, my dear brother Duck is a great big fan of the new My Little Pony series, so I endeavoured to depict one of his favourite characters on his cake. I missed progress shots of doing the basic frosting, but I just slathered on chocolate frosting as you would for any old layer cake, and then made a rough outline of the character in the still-wet frosting with a toothpick.

Once that was done I started piping the outlines in coloured vanilla frosting, and filling with the same frosting, but thinned out a bit.

Anyone very familiar with the show should - hopefully - get an idea of who this may be already. In future, I'm going to either thin the filling frosting more, or try out frozen buttercream transferring, but that takes ages and I was on quite the tight deadline by this point, so I forged on.

I had a small amount of not-hard-as-rock red fondant that I used for the pupils, everything else here is plain ol' frosting. I did his eye highlights with just a bit of white icing on a toothpick.

Filled in all the different areas with that slightly-thinned frosting...

Until his full face emerged! This, for those who don't watch Saturday morning cartoons aimed primarily at little girls and their families, is Discord, spirit of chaos, the main villain for the first couple of episodes of the second season.

Being spirit of chaos and disharmony, I wrapped his design down the sides of the cake, because Discord has no respect for your ideas of proper cake design. Here, you see his neck, mane, and horns poking down into the lower border.

Speaking of that border, I should have known putting a Lord of Chaos on a cake wouldn't go smoothly, I wanted that border to be done with a pretty star tip. So I fitted the tip to my trusty frosting bag and squeezed to remove air pockets -

And the bag exploded everywhere! It was my last frosting bag, too, so I had no choice but to jam the rest of the chocolate frosting in a regular freezer bag, snip the tip, and squeeze on a plain border.

Discord, spirit of Chaos, everybody! Jerk.

The good news is, bland border or no, Duck loved his cake. And when we sliced into these babies, mmmmm. 

Chocolately, buttery swirls of goodness!

I wish the marbling came out just a little prettier here. I think next time I'll go with smaller blobs of batter in that first marbling step to get a finer result.

Inside the giant cupcake, though, the marbling turned out absolutely gorgeous. I couldn't be prouder of the inside of this cake! (The outside, well, I learned a lot for next time!)

And there you have it, two marbled, baked, cooled, trimmed, frosted & decorated birthday cakes, one group of full & happy birthday party-goers, and one very tired baker.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned, I've got some Valentine's sweets planned for very, very soon!

Until next time!