2/27/2011

Baby Feet Cupcakes & my own Kitchen Nightmares!




One of my closest friends gave birth to her first child last week and I´ve been wanting to make some cupcakes to mark the special occasion so out came the apron and the electric whisk today. Unfortunately, like Alma from the blog Objectivo Cupcake I went to my cupboard only to find it bare, like Old Mother Hubbard....well, not exactly bare but I hadn´t realised that I´d run out of icing sugar. Don´t you just hate it when that happens? As it is a Sunday and all the shops are shut apart from a few little shops that sell basic food stuffs such as the imaginatively named Open Shop (which in desperation I tried but to no avail) there was no getting hold of icing sugar!


In the end I ended up having to improvise and this was the start of my Kitchen Nightmare! First of all I whipped up these basic vanilla sponge cupcakes/fairy cakes from Hannah Miles´s book Big Book of Cakes and Cookies, which is why again I haven´t included the recipe. The cakes seem really airy and light. I really love this book and up to now every recipe I´ve tried has turned out perfectly! So far,so good!


I decided to use some leftover Ballena fondant/royal icing from my Christmas Biscuit decorating course so set about melting it in a glass bowl placed inside a pan of boiling water (somehow the water always ends up boiling over and spilling everywhere). I then filled a disposable piping bag with a nozzle but the icing was so hot it was burning my hands. Plus the icing wasn´t coming out of the nozzle so quickly (I think I used too small a nozzle) plus maybe I made the consistency of the icing too thick and it soon started to set. I scrapped that idea and cut the icing bag and then tried to ice the cakes with a knife but as the cakes are so light and spongy, they started to crumble and break.


I then decided on option c....leftover fondant. As it had been stored in the fridge, it was rock hard and took a lot of working and kneading with my hands until it was workable. I then rolled it out finely and cut circles out to cover the top of the cupcakes, using apricot jam to stick it on. Using a decorating brush I applied some water to the pink baby footprints that my Mum had got me from Whittinghams in the UK to stick them onto the fondant. I tried to use my pink icing witing pen to write Congrats but didn´t like how it turned out so ended up leaving them as they were. Sometimes simple is the best anyway! I think I need a lot more cake decorating practice! It´s a good job I enjoy baking/ cake decorating as I spent almost the whole morning making them! The main thing is that hopefully my friend and her husband will appreciate them!

2 comments:

  1. Tengo el mismo libro!!! Te quedaron SÚPER bonitos!!!!!! Un besazo!!!!!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Alma! El libro es muy chulo ¿verdad?. Muchas gracias!Tengo otro curso de fondant pronto así que lo voy a subir en el blog! un beso!

    ReplyDelete

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