Canada Day Cupcakes

Yes, Canada Day was well over a week ago, I know.

But it is never too late to love my country! Especially in cupcake form.

Cheesy patriotism aside, there are a couple of reasons I'm sharing this so late. One is that I actually made these after Canada Day. The boys were away at Bronycon that entire weekend, as I may have mentioned briefly. So I whipped these up the day after Canada Day to be ready for their homecoming.

I also threw some welcome home messages on the leftover sugar cookies for the boys to munch.

Just ignore the one from the cats. I was very tired and mildly delirious when I decorated those.

Ah, so sentimental, especially that cookie right in the middle there. It's like a Hallmark card.

Now, I can't take credit for any of these photos, since hubby took them for me. I may or may not have burned my thumb extremely painfully while lighting fireworks for our (also a day late) Canada Day display and couldn't really handle the camera just then.

I also don't have how-to pics, because hubby took the camera with him on the Bronycon trip! (Kind of another reason this is so late... I was originally not going to make this post at all since it's so lacking in photos!)

So I'll try to explain the icing technique as best I can... I made a basic vanilla buttercream and tinted about half of it red. Then I piped a stripe of un-tinted white frosting down the middle of each cupcake and used a small off-set spatula to smooth it a bit. Once it was as smooth as I could get it, I piped the red frosting on either side to resemble the red fields of the flag, and again smoothed things out with the spatula.

To try to get an even smoother finish, I pressed and rolled the cupcake tops in granulated sugar.

Finally, I freehand-piped red maple leaves onto the white fields to complete the Canadian flag look, and pressed it into the sugar again, gently, so the whole top of the cupcake sparkled subtly.

Inside, as you can see, was white cake with red confetti. Much like I've done before, I simply folded some sprinkles into my favourite white cake recipe. Only this time, I actually kept control of myself and measured the sprinkles properly. The cake part turned out just perfect!

I should mention that the frosting technique I used was inspired by these awesome snow cone cupcake by Bakerella. Seriously, how adorable are those?? Anyway, I'd really like to do something like this again to better refine the technique, but as is, these were a nice welcome home surprise for homecoming hubby and bro.

What did you do for Canada Day? Or the Fourth of July? Or your country's own special holiday? I've lived my whole life in Canada and I hardly travel, so I'd love to hear how other countries celebrate their independence or founding anniversary holidays or what have you!

Next week, I'll share my attempt at whoopie pies, which will be a much longer and more in-depth post!

Until then!

Soft Serve Twist Ice Cream Cone Cupcakes

There is something about me you need to understand before we proceed.

I hate summer.

There, I've said it. I know, it makes no sense. Everyone loves summer - a time of fun in the sun, freedom from your studies, and getting to have super-fun mani-pedi dates with all your girlfriends so you can show off your cute nail polish in your brand new, fashionable wedge sandals.

I hate all those things.

Go ahead, judge me. I know, I'm a weirdo. But maybe you'll forgive me by the end of this post, because you know what I do love about summer? The ice cream truck! And the soft-serve ice cream that comes with it. My favourite is choco-vanilla twist with sprinkles...

Of course, this was all a big awkward segue into the fact that I felt like making ice cream cone cupcakes. Yes, those are cake! And guess what? The choco-vanilla twist goes all the way down.

If you know what I mean. Which is of course that the inside is swirled, too. What else could that even mean? Jeez, what were you thinking?

Anyway, to get the interior swirl effect, first prepare a batch each of your favourite white/yellow and chocolate cake batter, or a half-recipe, if you don't want to make 3 dozen of these! If you want my recipes, the chocolate cake is here and the yellow cake is here (uh, just omit the hot chili flakes. Yeah.)

Fill two piping bags with your batters, and tape them together near the tips so you can squeeze both bags at once. I totally got that idea from Bakerella, though I've made this type of cake before by putting 2 batters in the same bag. This was much simpler!

Carefully pipe swirls of batter into your ice cream cones. You'll notice I've stood mine in a cupcake pan for baking. When you pipe these, make sure you get right into the bottom sections so your cakes don't sink during baking.

Whatever you do, don't fill them this much! Leave about a half inch from the inner rim.

Use pie weights - or like I have, dried beans, to fill around the cones. This keeps them upright very well when they're being put into or taken out of the oven.

This picture isn't sideways. You're talking crazy.

Make at least as many mini cupcakes as you've made of the cones. You can swirl them too, if you like.

So, why did I tell you to be careful not to overfill your cones? Well, see, if they're overfilled, and they rise past the rim, they apparently can spill down the sides of the cones and make a big terrible mess.

Like that. Euugh. Luckily, they didn't all spill over, but I think we all learned a valuable lesson. Like I'm always saying, learn from my mistakes! I was able to save many of these. Others... the evidence had to be eradicated.

A dirty job, but some had to do it.

To decorate the cupcakes, once fully cooled, whip up your favourite vanilla and chocolate frostings, and cram them into the same piping bag. (By the way, my vanilla frosting is the same as the chocolate, except you omit the cocoa powder and up the icing sugar by a cup. So easy!) Try to keep them in their own half of the bag for the most part, but it's okay if they blend a bit. After all, a twist cone can be like that, too.

Yes, filling this piping bag was quite messy. But heck, messy is fun!

If your cake extends above the cone's outer rim, use a serrated knife to trim away the excess.

Pipe a little swirl of frosting on your trimmed cone cake.

Unwrap a mini cupcake, invert it, and smoosh it down on the frosting. This is kinda my favourite part. Or maybe I just like the word smoosh.

Smoosh smoosh smoosh!

It was very hard to get pics of the next step, so use the magic of imagination here. What you want to do is hold the cone in your off-hand, and wielding the piping bag in your writing hand, simply pipe a generous swirl of frosting along the outer rim of the cone cake, twisting up around the mini cupcake and culminating in a final swirl on top.

Hmm, what else?

Sprinkles!! Oh, how I love sprinkles. Especially rainbow jimmies. The best.

Mmm... if I have more excuses to make tasty fake-out treats like this, maybe this summer won't be too bad.

Hubby ate one of these on the bus on his way to work. At 10:30 PM. On a cool night. I really wish I could have been there. I hope there were double-takes.

In any case, these are super-fun to make, and messy as heck to eat, and a total party from start to finish. Highly recommended.

Ho boy, Father's Day is coming up fast, isn't it? No idea what I'm gonna do for my Dad this year. If I think of something, I'll let y'all know.

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.

...

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!