Tutorial - Icing Rose Cupcakes

Ok, I made another little batch of lemon drizzle cupcakes and thought this would be a good opportunity to rope Andy in to take some photos for a step-by-step tutorial.  He's got a new camera toy, a flash gun, and was very snap happy! After going through around 100 photos, here is what I have come up with...

1. Assemble your ingredients

For 12 cupcakes you will need:

100g full-fat cream cheese, at room temperature

50g unsalted butter

300g icing sugar, sieved

zest of half a lemon

food colouring (optional)

2. Make the frosting

Put the cream cheese, butter and icing sugar into a mixing bowl.  Very slowly at first (to keep all the icing sugar in the bowl and avoid looking like a snowman!) mix all the ingredients together using either an electric mixer, wooden spoon or hand-held electric whisk.

3. Add your flavouring and colour

When the mixture is light and fluffy, and forms little peaks (if it's too runny just add some more icing sugar), add the lemon zest and food colouring.  Try to use a food colouring paste as the colour is much stronger and it doesn't mess around with the consistency of the frosting.

4. Fill up your icing bag

I've used a no. 5 star shaped nozzle and cheated a bit with a plastic disposable piping bag.  You can easily make your own with greased proof paper or buy packs of the plastic disposable ones.  They're not great for little fiddly bits of icing but good when you're just using one colour and quite a bit of frosting.

5. Get icing!

Position your piping bag at 90 degrees to your cupcake.  

Start piping in the centre of your cupcake, applying even pressure on the piping bag.

Pipe clockwise, spiralling out towards the edge of your cupcake.  Don't leave any space between the lines of frosting.

When you get to the edge of your cupcake let the frosting trail off by releasing the pressure on the piping bag whilst guiding it around the edge of your cupcake.

6. Ta da!
Impress all your friends and family!

All About The Roses...

My gorgeous sister-in-law Mel and her lovely bloke Nev are getting married next August and they have asked me to do their wedding cake!  I've got a pretty free reign, which is quite exciting, but Mel has said that she likes the idea of cupcakes or minature cakes.  I've been starting to experiment...

The minature cakes are chocolate with a buttercream frosting and then covered in fondant icing coloured with pink colouring (the colour is slightly different than in the photo).  I made the rose from white fondant icing and added some glitter!

Here are some lemon drizzle cupcakes decorated with pink cream cheese frosting piped like a rose and then sprinkled with some glitter (it's all about the glitter!).  I just used plain cupcake cases as they were lying around but I think they would look better if they had a solid colour so will have a hunt for some prettier ones. 

I showed my little experiments to Mel and Nev and they seemed to really like them but I'm not convinced that we are there yet.  I'll get to it drawing a few more designs and making some more examples to make sure they have an amazing wedding cake!

Ice Cream Cupakes

As I am writing this it is tipping it down outside and it feels like summer is suddenly long gone!  I made these just over a month ago for my lovely husband's birthday, using a chocolate cupcake recipe.  I was very impressed at how they came out and thought it was a little bit special - but then I looked at a 'how to' videos on youtube and they said these were super easy and they'd been making them since they were brownies! Ah well, Andy liked them!

Birthday Cupcakes

The second party for my mother-in-law's birthday was more of a lavish affair! She had invited around 80 people so I set to making cupcakes!  

I made chocolate and orange, vanilla, orange and lemon cupcakes, all iced with a cream cheese frosting.  I used a recipe my mum had found in a magazine.  It's a basic cupcake recipe but you add a syrup to the just-cooked cupcakes to give them added moisture! Yum!

The sugarpaste butterflies were deceptively simple to make - I coloured some florist sugarpaste in a variety of bright colours then stamped out the butterflies with a cutter and left them on a folded piece of paper to dry in a V-shape.  Then, with some white royal icing, I gave each butterfly a body and some decorative dots on the wings.

The party had a beach theme so I decided on bright and happy colours and a big flower for the topper cake.  This was a bit more tricky but, helped along by the amazing Alan Dunn and Sugar Flowers for Cake Decorating, I got there in the end!

Here is the end result, in situ.  We managed to get a few photographs before the cupcakes started disappearing!