For the sponge, I used the vanilla cupcake recipe from The Hummingbird Bakery Cake Days. For some reason the recipe uses double the
amount of all the ingredients in the same bakery’s vanilla cupcake recipe in The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook while
claiming to produce the same amount. I decided
to try out the new one and ended up with twenty seven, rather more than I
needed for Gramps. Luckily, Grandma was
making dinner for everyone on Thursday, in two days time, so I put the rest
safely away and kept thirteen to write ‘Happy Birthday’ on. Despite a new oven, the cakes came out looking
generally unscathed, although a few were a bit brown on top. While they cooled, I got on with making the
balloons.
I made three balloons in green, pink and blue, and four
in yellow. I washed thirteen coloured
paperclips in washing up liquid, rinsing and drying them well before
straightening them out. I bent a curve
into the middle of each one, with a straight bit at the top. At the bottom I doubled the paperclip over to
stop it toppling over once the balloon was on top. To make the balloons I used small lumps of
fondant icing dyed with food colouring.
I took a small lump of the coloured icing, a couple of centimetres in diameter,
and rolled this into a ball. For the
knot of the balloon I took a small bit from the coloured icing and pushed it to
form a point. I stuck this under the
balloon, pushing gently until it stuck on.
I put the balloon down on a clean surface to dry, as I would need to
wait until I was at Gramps’ house to assemble them.
Meanwhile the cakes had cooled so I added a teaspoon of
strawberry jam to the top of each cake and smoothed it over. Using butter cream icing from Love Food: The Cupcake I put this on top
of the jam and smoothed it down with a spoon.
Although it got a bit mixed up with the jam, this did not really matter
as the taste would be the same. I rolled
out white fondant icing and used a cookie cutter to cut wavy circles large
enough to cover the top of each cupcake and gently put each one on top of the
jam and butter cream. I had initially
wanted to spell out ‘Happy Birthday’ on the cakes in blue fondant icing, but I
did not have any cutters and was running out of time. Instead, I used spare butter cream to stick
small blue circles in the centre of each cake, and went to Gramps’ to construct
the cakes.
A few of the paperclips needed bending again to make them
look more like balloon strings, and I think that the ‘Happy Birthday’ message
would have looked better. The idea did
not quite work as I had hoped. However, the
vanilla sponges were very light, and were proclaimed by Mum to be ‘the best we’ve
had yet’, which was a nice compliment.
They really tasted just like little birthday cakes, even if the balloons
left me a little deflated.
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