Mothers Day Cupcakes

As much as I love traipsing around countless shops which have been plastered in pink and filled with scented candles, mum-friendly DVDs and chocolate, I decided that it would be more fun to bake my mum a present this year.  I decided on red velvet, as she had previously mentioned, in a slightly mystified way, that they seem to be really popular at the moment.  Normally, Mum is not one for food dye (blue food is a red flag in her eyes) so this seemed like a good opportunity to unleash my inner child on the rainbow while still making her happy.

I used the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook for both the cupcake sponge and the cream cheese icing.  I also used muffin cases because these recipes are for American-style cupcakes, which are traditionally larger than English cupcakes.  However, the recipe only made eleven of these, whereas using smaller cake cases would, obviously, leave you with more cakes.

While I always enjoy baking, this recipe was particularly intriguing for two reasons.  Adding the distinctly brown cocoa powder/ food dye paste and watching the mixture turn red was a bit like watching a low budget but fascinating magic show.  On a similar note, the combination of bicarbonate of soda and vinegar brought back memories of papier-mâché volcanoes and the time when science was still fun.  I was a bit worried that these two oddities would reveal my baking ignorance (I went a bit Quentin Tarantino with the red food dye) and ruin everything, meaning a last minute dash to a garden centre.  However, the cakes rose (thank you God of Baking) and were definitely red.

I used cream cheese icing to top the cake, as I liked how the two colours contrasted.  As flowers are a traditional Mothers Day gift, I decided to make roses like the ones from Erin’s Birthday Cake.  I bought ready-made fondant icing and used liquid food dye in yellow, green, blue and pink to dye lumps of it, and for the purple I mixed the blue and red in a separate bowl before adding it.  I found that the easiest way to spread the colour evenly was to divide about two tablespoons of fondant in half, carefully putting about five drops of colouring (for a really bright colour) in the middle and then folding the fondant in on itself until the colour was spread consistently with no marble effect.  If the fondant is too cold or is left out, it will go hard and crumbly; if it is too warm, it will be slippery and will fall apart.  By the time I got to the last few colours, the fondant had gone quite hard.  However, the food dye made it softer, but not so soft as to be disobedient.  To find out how to make the fondant roses, click here.  My top tip would be to keep the petals an equal size, and to make sure that they are not much taller than the thin strip, as this makes them look slightly disproportionate.

While the roses were still far inferior to those in the tutorial, I was really pleased with how these cakes turned out.  In fact, there may even have been a small jig and musical number involved, but that’s another story.  More important than my response or musical ability was Mum’s reaction; she loved them, which just goes to prove that it is the thought that counts.  While the cakes saved me from sore feet and hours of hunting through pink chocolate-flavoured scented candles, they also meant that I got to eat cake.  Although this was delicious, the sweeter treat was being able to give Mum my time and appreciation in tasty cake form.

Flavour of the Month - March 2012

With spring springing and reminding us that there is life beyond random bouts of snow and thermal underwear, it is time to celebrate not just Mother Nature but mums everywhere.  This Mothers Day, why not give your mum the opportunity to have her flowers and eat them?

Rose

A classic symbol of all types of love, these are probably the most popular flowers make for cupcakes.  For a video demonstrating how to make fondant roses, there is a link on the post for Erin’s Birthday Cake.

The aptly named Violet here shows how to ice a butter cream rose, including leaves, straight onto a cupcake.

Another example of a butter cream rose minus the leaves, this video is slower and shows the method more clearly.

Daisy

Reminiscent of carefree childhood days in which a chain of these was an acceptable present, these are perhaps one of the most appropriate flowers for a Mother’s Day cupcake.  While they look more fiddly than the roses, they are very effective and not too tricky.

Chrysanthemum

For those green-fingered mothers who are simply not satisfied with a traditional rose, the exceptionally happy Tengsern here shows how to ice a chrysanthemum onto a cupcake.

Sunflower

The perfect flower for a playful cupcake, this video shows how to ice a sunflower using a fairly simple method which will please fans of Oreos and butter cream icing.  No ladybirds were injured in the making of this video.

Bow

If your mum is not a flower fan, or suffers from severe hay fever brought on by iced imitations, this pretty fondant bow is a lovely alternative cupcake topper.

Still struggling for inspiration? Here are some of my favourite mother's day cakes to give you some ideas.  Click each image to visit the original website and discover more cake creations.

Gardener's World

Returning to the floral garden theme, this pastel-coloured garden cake is feminine without being, childish.  Particularly delightful are the little details, such as the flower on the cuff of the glove and the ladybirds.

I love you sew much

This careful construction is a spectacular tribute to those mothers who prefer sewing fabric over seeds.  Another example of the beauty in fine details, this has a tape measure, cotton reels and buttons to complete the picture.

Mum's the word

Finally, for those who like to court controversy, this is a tongue-in-cheek reminder of the reason mothers deserve a break; just make sure she is feeling suitably well-treated when you bring it out. 

Happy Mothers Day to all mums reading, and particularly my own mum, Julie.

Need to remind someone of this important fact?
Buy the handy magnet here. 

Erin’s Birthday Cake

In something of a promotion from my last birthday-related cake-based project, I have moved from making the accompanying cupcakes to the main event.  That’s right; this time, I got to make the one with the candles, the theme song and the massive amounts of fondant icing.

A lot of love, labour and chocolate went into this cake.  It took me about four hours all in all, leaving my friend and I just enough time to deliver it to Frankie & Benny’s before the arrival of the birthday girl.  Aside from the aforementioned ingredients, it also involved a lot of planning.  Before the meal, a few people were going to Cadbury World to consume large amounts of free chocolate and ride around in a cocoa bean.  While I love chocolate and would never eat anything else (except ratatouille, cheeseburgers and bacon) if it were in any way practical and socially acceptable, I thought that in this case chocolate cake might be a bit too much.  I had a recipe for strawberry cake which I thought might do.  Cue an undercover mission involving much confusion over the nature of Bakewell tarts in order to find out whether Erin likes strawberries.  Having ascertained that she doesn’t mind them, I exhibited a tremendous lack of imagination and decided to make chocolate cake (well, bacon has its limitations as far as cakes go).

For the triple-layered chocolate sponge I used the Hummingbird Bakery’s recipe for Brooklyn Blackout Cake.  I had used it before, for the Clown Cake, and it proved to be just as reliable this time, with a lovely crumbly sponge texture and rich flavour.  For the filling I halved the chocolate custard recipe from the same page in The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook.  It was the strangest thing I have ever made.  If the caster sugar, golden syrup, cocoa powder and water boiling on the stove was not concerning enough, the gloopy, gluey Flubber-like cornflour and water mixture looked entirely inedible.  However, when the two were combined, it somehow, inexplicably, worked, which just goes to support the theory that adding chocolate to anything can only improve it (unless that thing is bacon).

The trickiest bit was the decoration.  While I take a neurotic and creative pride in the appearance of all of my cakes (including the resiliently messy Mississippi Mud Pies), this cake, as a birthday cake, had to look particularly special.  Having spent a while pondering, I had an epiphany in a truly inspirational place: the baking aisle of Sainsbury’s in Selly Oak.  In order to carry out my vision, I found a video on YouTube which showed how to make a simple rose out of fondant icing, which is something I had wanted to try.  The video is quick but very clear and helpful, and can be found here.  I made a few the night before, also experimenting with food dye.  While the video recommends using colouring paste, I found that a small amount of liquid food dye (much easier to get hold of) does not affect the rigidity of the flower too much.  I used bright pink food dye on a lump of white fondant icing large enough for nine roses (well, twelve), which would mean everyone going could have a rose and they would all be a consistent colour.  I made them while the cakes were in the oven, and while they are simple to make they are trickier to really refine; the sizing was slightly inconsistent and some of them looked more rose-like and delicate than others.  However, all together they seemed to work.

Over Christmas, my Grandma and I decorated a fruit cake using fondant icing and those small silver balls widely regarded as a marvel akin to sliced bread and the pyramids.  We cut a snowflake shape out of the icing, stuck the icing to the cake, then filled the shape with the balls.  I decided that rather than writing Erin’s name on the cake in my typically shaky, small-child style, I would cut her name out and fill it with the pink sparkles that had been missing from Mum and Aunty Jane’s Birthday Cupcakes.  I rolled out the fondant and cut around the outside of the cake tin to get the right size and shape, then cut her name out in the middle of the cake.  Thankfully, ‘Erin’ is as short as it is pretty, and has lots of lovely straight letters, so it was not that difficult.  Having smoothed some more chocolate custard over the top, I very carefully lifted the icing and placed it on the top.  Cutting around the tin had helped but I still had to straighten the edges and smooth it all out a bit once it was on the cake.  I then filled each letter with a sizable amount of pink sparkles, trimmed the ends of the roses and pressed them gently round the letters.

Having finished, I could not quite believe that everything had gone according to plan.  Nothing broke, nothing was undercooked, the mysterious icing mixture came together, the roses looked at least vaguely like roses, the name was readable and vaguely in the centre and nothing fell off.  Of course, it wasn’t perfect; the angle it was leaning at made a certain Italian tower feel threatened, a few of the roses more closely resembled cabbages and the fondant wasn’t a perfect size.  However, as I handed it over to the very nice people at Frankie & Benny’s and asked in an alarmingly motherly way if it could sit somewhere cool, I felt very proud of my creation.  Fortunately, Erin appreciated having cake presented to her in public, accompanied by loud music and balloons.  She loved the cake and was genuinely grateful, which meant a lot.  Even those friends who had been to Cadbury World and never wanted to see chocolate again were nice enough to force down a slice and say it tasted good.  This all suggests, to my mind at least, that public displays of friendship and birthdays go better when cake is involved.

Vanilla and Strawberry Cupcakes

Having iced the thirteen mini birthday cakes for Gramps, I had fourteen vanilla cupcakes left over.  I made some more butter cream icing using the recipe from Love Food: The Cupcake, adding three teaspoons of strawberry jam and mixing well.  I smoothed this onto the cakes and rolled out a small lump of fondant icing.  Using a small sharp knife I cut little hearts out of the fondant and stuck them gently on the cakes.  They still tasted light and fluffy even after a few days, and the butter cream and strawberry icing worked nicely.  Waste not want not, I suppose; you cannot have too much of some good things.

Mini Birthday Cakes

My next cake project was for my grandad’s eightieth birthday.  Birthday cakes for me have a very specific taste – soft vanilla sponge with a strawberry jam and buttercream filling and topped with beautifully sickly fondant icing.  I decided to try and emulate this specific taste in the miniature form of a cupcake.  Since birthdays are supposed to be extra happy days, I wanted to make them standout; with this in mind, I decided to try and make 3D icing balloons coming out of the cakes.

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.