Sunflower Cuppie: Completed

Sunflower Cuppie

with Oreo cookie

(+5 skill points => 305 / 400)

Usually cupcakes don't add to my skill points, but these were special.  A big shout out and "thank you"s to:

• KHalstead from cakecentral.com (Tina) for sharing her method for creating cupcake bouquets.
• The book Hello, Cupcake, which I don't own, but all the photos of the sunflower cupcakes on cakecentral say they got the design from.
• Martha Stewart for posting her own sunflower cuppie design.

Stats:

• Duncan Hines Dark Chocolate Fudge cake mix
• IMBC from Cake Love (chocolate and vanilla flavored)
• I used Wilton's Meringue Powder instead of raw egg whites since I'd be giving these cuppies to kids.
• Oreo cookie

Lonnie and I have been trying hard to make a chocolate icing that tastes better than store-bought tub icing.  Consider this another failed attempt.  I first made a 2:1 ganache with Baker's semi-sweet chocolate and heavy whipping cream.  This was added to my IMBC.  It tasted ok ... but it's not great.  I'm not used to semi-sweet chocolate except in chocolate chip cookies.  Perhaps I should have tried milk chocolate.  I was expecting a darker color too, but that didn't happen.  Oh well.  It was easy to work with, and I have plenty left over.

I piped a generous base on to the cuppie before smooshing down the cookie on top.

The vanilla IMBC got a hefty dose of Wilton's different yellow coloring gels.  "Golden Yellow" was too orange, but after I added a bunch of "Lemon Yellow", I got a nice, bright color that was perfect for my sunflowers.

Martha Stewart's design called for 3 rows of "petals" using a leaf tip.  I used Wilton #68 and made 2 rows, alternating the petal placement so they could be offset.

For the second row, I started the tip inside the Oreo so the IMBC could really fill in the space and look attached.

I've never had any training for using the leaf tip ... my petals kept breaking off.  I tried twisting, I tried yanking, I tried coasting ... I couldn't figure it out.

Afterward I researched cakecentral.com's forums for using leaf tips.  There were several suggestions specifically for tips like #68 to pry them open slightly.  Tips that look like "baby birds' mouths" are more likely to yield pointed leaf ends.  Mine was the "fish mouth" kind that tend to be too narrow to get much success unless you modify it.  Oh well.  Next time I'll try a different tip.

I wanted to try making an individual cupcake "bouquet".  There are many cupcake bouquet tutorials available online, but I wanted to try to highlight just one serving.  I bought several 4" flower pots from Walmart at $0.75 each.  KHalstead from cakecentral.com shared that some of her bouquets have the cuppies sitting in a 5 oz. plastic cup.  My 5 oz. cups were a little too short for the flower pot, so I used some extra 1 oz. cups to give them a boost.  Use your favorite glue to keep things steady.

Ages ago my roommate thought it bright to serve Jello shots at one of our parties.  Once we all moved out, I inherited the plethora of 1 oz. cups that we had over-zealously bought.  Nowadays I jump at any excuse to use them.  They are great holders for paint, glue, confectioner's glaze, you name it.  Here I attached one upside down to the bottom of the 5 oz. cup.

The rim of the 1 oz. cup is covered in adhesive and placed in to the pot.

The cuppie sits comfortably in the 5 oz. cup like so:

Once everything is in, add some grass to hide the cups and provide more stability.

Afterward I decorated the pot with cardstock and curled ribbon, personalizing it for my nephew as a fun Easter present.

Cute, huh?  I think these would be fantastic Mother's Day presents or maybe for a house warming.  I took several of these over to a couple different neighbors with kids, and they seemed really impressed.  Give 'em a shot!  They'll brighten someone's day!

House Warming Cake: Completed

House Warming Cake
(+5 skill points -> 115/400)

In a previous post were the design plans for this cake. Overall we had some hits and some misses. Here's the play by play.

I baked a vanilla box cake on Thursday night and stuck it in the freezer. The next day, I didn't know that I should thaw the cake before working with it. It was too hard to tort it with my nifty cake leveler, so I used a serrated knife and sawed away. I'm not so good at torting with a knife ... which is why I bought the leveler ... I ended up slicing my left hand a little. Oh well, it turned out good enough.


The filling was cream cheese tub frosting. Can't go wrong with that.


Now for some really green buttercream. This was the regular Wilton recipe plus a combination of cheap liquid food coloring and a smidge of gel food coloring. Icing it was nice because it's a round cake!

The stack of cake boards I bought are way too big for an 8" cake, but I was too lazy to trim it. That made shoving it in my plastic cake storage thingie difficult.

Next came making the fondant fence posts. I rolled out some marshmallow fondant and cut them into 2" x 1/4" strips. I used a heavy duty super sharp pizza cutter and a wooden ruler. I smoothed out some rough edges afterward with my finger tips.



Earlier in the week I had tinted and rolled out MMF for the welcome mat. To do the outlines, I made a small batch of royal icing and tinted it black. I thought would have to use a lot of the gel coloring but it turned out a little went a long way. Maybe it's just easier to color royal icing instead of a big batch of buttercream.


Here's the inspiration and the template I made for the welcome mat:


I printed out the template and put it under the brown fondant. Those went on top of my makeshift light box (plastic bin, small lamp, unused glass door from our entertainment center). I think I used a #3 tip to pipe out the outlines. It went well! In order to get smooth lines, I used some of the stringwork piping techniques and didn't allow the icing to touch down until the last second.



I iced the cake with the green buttercream. I marked 2 lines on the side of the cake where I wanted the fence posts to connect to. Piping short sections of white royal icing, I worked quickly to get my fence posts stuck on to the cake. There's an uncovered section that's the "front" of the cake. The fence ended with 2 larger posts to simulate a walkway entrance.


Tip #233 was used to make grass on the top of the cake so it could look like a lawn. I've never used this tip before so it took a few practice shots to get the height I wanted. This seemed to take forever and I didn't even do the entire top!


Plop! The welcome mat is centered in the middle. I added more grass where I had missed before. Please ignore that nobody actually puts their welcome mat on their front lawn ;)


I wanted to add a bunch of little flowers around the cake to pretty it up, but that ended up being a fail. I couldn't find the right drop flower tip that I wanted. When I got it, the royal icing was way too thin. My flower melted into the grass! I made some leaves from the leftover buttercream to try and redeem myself.




My family enjoyed the cake. House warming cake: complete!

Fails:

• I should have thawed out the cake, still in its plastic wrap, thoroughly before working with it
• trimming the cake board is still important
• I suck at making flowers

FTWs:

• round cakes are so much easier to ice than square ones
• makeshift light box will help me in many projects to come
  
• line piping with royal icing went well
• I now have experience with using tip #233