Since I moved out in November I've been doing a ridiculous amount of cooking and baking. I got it into my head that I wanted everything that my boyfriend and I ate to be homemade and nutritious. This is very hard to do when you are also working 10 hour shifts in a hospital. I would come home from work wrecked and grumpy and have to launch into cooking a huge meal like my mommy would make. I also wanted the house to be show house clean, washing and ironing to done and to keep some kind of a social life. I got so tired of trying to keep up with all of this that I decided I would hang up my apron for the summer. I had been doing really well until Friday. My good friend in work is leaving for Australia this month and we had a going away party for her on Friday afternoon. She is addicted to cupcakes (almost as addicted as I am to making them), so I decided to make a batch. I was too late coming home from work on Thursday night to go to any proper cooking supply shop so I had to buy some plastic icing nozzles and make my own piping bag using large lunch bags. The result was actually quite cute. I made vanilla cupcakes with pink butter cream icing. On half the cakes I put wafer daisies and on the other half I put shimmering sugar crystals. They went down such a treat that It really got me in the mood to do some more baking.
So that's what happened today...I made these for my sisters kids.
I have made lots of cupcakes before but usually I just put a bit of butter cream on them as a topping. I decided I wanted to try to work with fondant icing. I have been told there are places you can get block fondant and colouring paste but as it was my first time I wanted to get something a little easier on the pocket. I used my mums tried and tested cupcake recipe (and made 24 frickin cupcakes, 12 of which are now hanging out in my freezer for fear I'll eat them all), and I got these cool little Packets of coloured fondant and icing pens.
Can I just say that fondant icing is so very frickin difficult to work with. If anyone has any tips to help me I would really appreciate it. It stuck on the chopping board even though I had dusted it with icing sugar. I had to use a knife to scrape the circle shapes off the board and reshape them in my hand before I could put them on the cake. I also found that the cakes were raised in the middle, fine if you are making cupcakes piled with butter cream icing but not so great when you are trying to balance little spiders in the middle of the cake. I have been bitten by the bug though and I am thinking of more and more designs to do. The kids loved the cakes (and the big kids loved the taste of chocolate cake and orange icing). As for the cakes in the freezer, they await decorating, I will keep you posted.....
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