Snowflakes on Peach and Cinnamon

I just finished this box of liners, so I guess that means I've made about 120 cupcakes in about 10 months. A dozen cupcakes a month isn't too bad an average considering how busy we get in Japan!

We had some friends over for dinner recently, and while the dinner itself was cooking I set them to work decorating cupcakes with icing sugar.

We just used regular paper to make the snowflake templates and sprinkled the icing sugar over it.

Larger shapes seem to come out clearer.

And our newest resident, Johnasaurus, seemed pretty keen to try them.

Pirate cupcake misadventure

I had some rosewater buttercream leftover from my turkish delight cupcakes and thought I should use it up somehow. Tip for the future: rosewater buttercream doesn't really go with chocolate cupcakes! But I had fun with the decorating.

Here are my cupcakes, all ready to go. I used Willow Bird Baking's "Wacky Cake" recipe base, which is egg and dairy-free. (It came out a bit dry, but maybe I over-baked it... nothing a bit of Nutella filling wouldn't fix next time!)

My Domestic Cowboy has previously bought black food colouring gel from a specialty store to make cookie icing, but we recently discovered that you can get this liquid stuff at the supermarket much cheaper! As you can see, it doesn't really make the icing black, but it had kind of an interesting silvery metallic sheen to it.

I first did a layer of blue, à la pirate-infested water. And then it was time to test out the new 3S icing tip.

Turns out 3S is great for writing and drawing! (...if you can draw :p)

Although the flavour combination was less than grand, I was quite happy with these, and with the potential for making "Eat Me" Alice In Wonderland cakes in the future with my new friend, 3S.

Arr, me hearties!

Honey cupcakes with honey & cinnamon buttercream

I found a recipe for honey cupcakes on Oprah's website. I wouldn't have thought to look there for recipes but this one came up in a search and she got it from a White House pastry chef, so I thought it was worth a try. Which is somewhat ironic because I don't like honey by itself, but it's OK in tea, so I thought I'd give it a go in cake.

I got out my scales again to continue my cupcake weight experiment (OCD?). I made a few 25 gram mini cupcakes and they came out just the right size. Full, but not rising over the top :)

I also made 12 muffin-size cakes and tried them with slightly different weights - a row of 55g (far left), row of 60g, row of 65g and row of 70 grams (far right). As you can see none of them rose over the top, which was my main objective. The 55g cakes looks a little scant, but if you're going to be piping icing on top of them anyway I don't think it really matters - you'd still be getting quite a mouthful of cake if you got one of those!

Oprah's chef proposed a simple frosting of icing sugar, honey and lemon juice, which probably would have been fine. But I wanted something that I could pipe! So I decided to try a honey cinnamon buttercream which I found on Loves To Eat (...I remember the days when I could still afford bananas for baking...*sigh*). I'm a die-hard cinnamon fan so it seemed like a decent idea.

A word of advice: taste your icing before you pipe it all over your cakes. If I'd done this I think I would've added some more cinnamon... it just seems to be lacking something. Which makes me think that Oprah's version with the lemon juice might have been just right - a bit of a citrus kick. Next time.

I probably did too many of my beloved rosette swirls, but they're just so pretty. Also I was lazy and only used one tip - the smaller 22 star. As expected it looked a little small on the larger cakes.

I got a bit carried away with some of them, but I quite like how this one came out.

Overall I wasn't hugely impressed by the honey cake, but like I said, I'm not really a honey fan to begin with. They're not bad.

The cupcake army advances.

More of the same - mini vanilla cupcakes with rosewater buttercream

I had a half batch of rosewater buttercream frosting left over in the fridge so thought I'd try Little Betsy Baker's Vanilla Cupcake Recipe again to make mini cupcakes and spend more time playing with my new icing set (mainly star tip 22).

I guess this is obvious, but I was reading the other day on someone's blog that they weigh their cupcakes to get them all exactly the same size. So I had a go at that, but didn't know how much to actually aim for! My tray takes 24 small cupcakes and I initially put 30 grams into each case, but then had a little left over which I shared out amongst them... so I suppose they were more like 32g. And that was slightly too much. They spread out and stuck together, so next time I won't try to squeeze it all into the one pan - lesson learned.

And then I set to work on the actual decorating, which is good fun. I wanted to experiment a little bit so ended up with a varied assortment of little cakes.

As this was the same icing batch from the other day I mostly just had the pale pink colour, but I did keep a little bit without colouring (the occasional pale yellow detail that you can see). I don't mind the pastel shades, but brighter colours would be better for contrast, and I think you really need the icing to be a bit harder if you're going to be piping on top of a base layer.

I like the rosette shape (below centre) better than the traditional swirl (probably because I can't get my swirls very neat just yet).

Vanilla cupcakes with rosewater buttercream icing swirls - success!

The first time I attempted to ice cupcakes with "swirls" I used the wrong kind of icing (a soft cream cheese) and the wrong kind of icing tip (straight and not very wide). So I ended up with a random selection of squiggles and shapes, which were fine (and delicious), but not what I was aiming for.

A little reading suggested that I would do much better with a Wilton 1M star tip and a buttercream icing recipe. So my first step was to go out and buy a Wilton 12-Piece Cupcake Decorating Set (for the princely sum of around $20), still a little dubious about the difference a special tip could make.

I had my vanilla cupcakes ready to go (my first time making these using a recipe from Little Betsy Baker) and I thought they might go nicely with Cupcake Gal's buttercream frosting, using rosewater essence instead of vanilla, and just a tiny bit of red food colouring to get a pretty pale pink. It came out looking like gloriously fluffy pink clouds.

Then I set about the task of actually creating my swirls. And might I just say - the 1M star tip is fantastic! I was very pleasantly surprised at how quick and easy it was to decorate each cake. They still look a little clumsy (I positioned the messiest ones furthest from the camera), but overall I was very happy with the results.

They also tasted really good! I think the vanilla cupcake recipe is a keeper - a nice standard flavour to dress up. The buttercream icing itself was a little softer than I would've liked, so I'll have to work on that. Very sweet too, which should maybe be toned down (depending on taste). I'd suggest using just 1 teaspoon of rosewater essence, or maybe even just 1/2 a teaspoon and see how it tastes.