So, Monday is Cupcake Day for the RSPCA. It’s my one real active contribution to a charity – once a year I spend the better part of my weekend baking and decorating cupcakes then I lug them in to work and sell them to my colleagues. It’s a lot of work.
I don’t know if it has to be a lot of work but I generally try to make really fancy cupcakes by some animal related theme, so it ends up being a lot of work.
By the end of the weekend, the thought of actually eating a cupcake is unthinkable.
But I want to support the RSPCA and I love a baking challenge so this is the third year in a row I've participated.
This year, I had my parents visiting and an assignment for uni so I decided to bake smart. I made my cupcakes yesterday, using a recipe from Taste.com.au which I modified slightly.
White Chocolate mud cupcakes: http://bit.ly/nsaTg2
Instead of vanilla bean paste, which I forgot to buy, I used the same quantity of vanilla essence, and I didn’t make the ganache. I also made triple the quantity.
The mixture rose more than I expected so the first batch were a little tricky to get out of the cases but after that I managed to get consistent sized cupcakes.
I also made chocolate decorations to go with the cupcakes. Using chocolate moulds, colouring powders and white and dark chocolate, I made lady beetles and flowers.
After several hours I called it a day.
This morning I started by making light yellow frosting, using icing sugar, butter and colouring. Then the decoration began.
I took inspiration from What's New Cupcake by Karen Tack and Alan Richardson for the ants and the bees (which I am most happy with)! My theme was the garden and the beach. I made the beehive but used puff pastry which I brushed with honey and dusted with yellow decorating sugar before baking until golden, instead of making a cookie dough. For the bees I used black jelly beans with yellow gel writing icing and almond slices for wings. I didn't get many black jelly beans so I used some yellow with black stripes as well.
For the ants, I mixed up some green frosting and used chocolate cover almonds and black icing writing gel for the legs. Some glace cherries provided bounty for the ants.
I used some of my chocolate flowers on the green background also and Dino helped me to make the snail above. I bought a roll of licorice which was the inspiration for his body. His shell is a marshmallow coated in writing gel icing!
For my chocolate lady beetles, I used green frosting to ice the cupcake and built up a leaf shape and outlined veins with green food colouring and then placed my beetles.
I made some white chocolate shells and popped them on some light frosting with a sprinkling of decorating sugar to create a beach. Then I decided that wasn't clear enough so I made some blue frosting with blue decorating sugar for the sea and made some pastry fish and a crab (again aided by Dino!) to complete the scene. I attempted a sand castle which failed.
The end results are displayed en masse below!
It took longer than I expected to decorate and then the kitchen looked like a bomb site, so I cleaned. My plan was to finish by 2pm and start working on my assignment. By 3pm I sat down, feeling slightly stressed, only to discover that the deadline has been extended! Yay.
Meanwhile, the puppies spent the better part of the weekend snuggling...
No comments:
Post a Comment