Let them eat cake!

My one and only attempt at cupcake decorating. It seemed like a great idea at the time as a cheap and easy alternative to a shop bought birthday gift. I was soooo wrong! They ended up costing more than a store bought present and took forever to get right. And because I had to make them upstairs in secret I managed to block the bathroom sink with buttercream and destroy the study. Those tiny hundreds and thousands really do get absolutely everywhere.......

I've made cake before, with varying degrees of success given the succession of temperamental ovens I have owned. The focus so far has been on edibility rather than their decorative appeal, but my son's (now ex) girlfriend is a rabid cupcake fanatic so I decided to try making cakes for her birthday that reflected her personality. Cakes are cheap to make, quick and easy, I thought. I was oh so very wrong. If you have the equipment, the ingredients, the knowhow and expertise it may well be cheap, quick and easy (possibly), but armed only with my knowledge of the sculptural properties of clay I approached the block of fondant icing and uttered the immortal words ‘how hard can it be?’

My first mistake was believing that fondant icing would be rather like plasticine or modelling clay. Fondant does not behave like any other substance known to man. Roll it thin and it goes too floppy to do anything with; bend it and it starts to crack. Make it a bit thicker so that it will hold its shape while bent without cracking and it takes ages to dry. And you can’t smooth and blend it like clay, because even if it’s thick it collapses and melts into a gooey mess as soon as you get it near water. It was a very steep learning curve and I had to start making the decorations more than a week before I needed them. I should mention that I'm very much a creature of impulse and planning ahead is rarely on the agenda.

Anyway, it took a week of ‘spare time’ to prepare the decorations. I decided to use gum paste instead of fondant to make the decorations because I’d heard that it dried faster and could be rolled thinner, so that speeded things up a bit, but not by much. Oh, and it tastes awful - rather like eating very thin bone china (or so I'd imagine).

I had the basic cake-making ingredients (flour, butter eggs, icing sugar, etc) but in addition to those I still ended up buying: fondant icing, gum paste, a selection of gel food colours, a black icing pen, a set of star shaped cutters, wire, foil cake cases, a selection of hundreds and thousand, dragees and general cake decorations, a couple of plastic 21st birthday keys, a piping bag with nozzles, a cupcake holder for display at the party and a special cardboard cupcake box to transport them to the party. Not cheap. You could say that as I’ve already bought all this stuff it will be cheap next time I make them. Except there almost certainly won’t be a next time.

I made about forty cakes in total (a mix of red velvet, chocolate and vanilla). That was the easy part. I decided to decorate some with buttercream, some with cream cheese frosting and some with the fondant icing. I coloured the fondant in small batches and kept it in sealed ziplock bags to stop it from drying out. I coloured the buttercream and frosting as I needed it. I hadn't piped icing before so it took a few attempts to get it right. I used a circular cutter the same size as the cake top to cut out the rolled fondant and stuck it to the cake with a little buttercream. 

To make the winged heart  I first printed images from the internet onto ordinary paper, cut them out and used them as templates on rolled out and coloured fondant. The wings were created in two sections, with the smaller, inner wing 'glued' onto the larger piece with a little icing sugar and water paste. The detail was drawn on using a black icing pen once the wings were completely dry. The banner was made from a narrow strip of rolled fondant slightly less than double the widest part of the heart. The ends were cut into a V shape and, while still pliable, the underside of the strip was coated in icing glue, laid on the already dried heart and carefully moulded around the sides of the heart with the banner ends folded back on themselves so the final half inch or so poked out at each end. Once dried, the heart was glued to the wings.

The buttons were cut with a small, circular cutter and the buttonholes made with a skewer. Once dry, the buttons and holes were edged with the black icing pen and short sections of red liquorice were threaded through the holes to simulate thread. I can't take credit for the skulls and the 'Hello Kitty' heads as these were bought from ebay, but as they were press-moulded from fondant I doubt they'd be difficult to make. And it was cheaper than buying moulds.

So what have I learned?

1. Unless I really, really want to impress someone, or love them very much, or have way too much time on my hands this is not something I'm going to be doing on a regular basis. The entire project took a fortnight to plan and execute and took up all my spare time - the baking and decorating alone took two entire days. That said, the more you do something, the faster you get so if there was to be a next time I'm sure it would be quicker, except I'd want to try something completely different which would slow me down......
2. Store bought, while not as attractive (or tasty) is definitely the cheaper option.
3. Although I enjoyed working out how to make the decorations, making hundreds of stars and buttons bored me to tears. I'm definitely a one-off crafter.
4. Putting in the extra effort really does make a difference to the final result. I might have wished that I'd never started (many times over), but I was pleased with the final result - though not enough to want to do it again.