Snapshots: Rose Birthday

Wow I have just noticed that Princess Cupcake's Cakes has had over 2000 page views! That is a thousand hits in about 3 months! Thank you so much everyone!

And now onto some real content, here is one of my latest bakes. This cake was made especially for my mum for her birthday last week

Nothing too fancy as I was rather busy last week, this was actually decorated while I was cooking a big family dinner for 6 people!!! (I'm not very good at cooking for more than 4 people normally, though I did cook for 10 very hungry archaeologists once). But this is the first use of my heart shaped, silicone cake pan that I picked up around Valentines. It's a cute mold but despite being thoroughly greased the cake stuck slightly on the bottom, not sure why.

It's a chocolate cake covered with Betty Crocker cream cheese style icing (like I said I was busy, I didn't have time to make frosting!) I then carefully piped the lettering and hearts with one of those little icing tubes you can buy in the supermarkets. The hearts were then filled in with pink edible glitter and the cake finished off with some beautiful dried rose petals and candied rose petals (the pink bits) that I have lurking in my sprinkle stash.

Mum loved it and my grandparents were pretty impressed too, I hope you my lovely readers like it to.

Next week I have a new recipe coming up and some other exciting goodies. Game of Thrones is involved ;)

Snapshots: Lord of the Rings

So it's time for another edition of snapshots and this one continues in my nerdy theme.
Out of boredom at the weekend I decided to make and decorate some muffins and figured that a Lord of the Rings inspired design would be cute. So here are some slightly nerdy chocolate and ginger muffins.

This one is called "A Shortcut to Mushrooms". It features a pale green meringue frosting and adorable little sugarpaste mushrooms (made out of leftover grey from the Companion Cube cake).

I think these are really cute, but next time I make them I need to make a better coloured frosting, it needs to be more grass like in colour. I'll also make more mushrooms in different sizes and perhaps some little daisies just to add a hint of colour into the design. 

And these are called "One Ring to Rule Them All" (V1). Like the mushrooms these also have meringue frosting, and sugarpaste rings. The rings were made of yellow sugarpaste which I then brushed with gold luster dust. 

These are called V1 because me and my mum thought up a much cooler way to do this design, which I will get round to making soon. 

I'm so happy that these came out ok, I have so many other awesome ideas for nerdy cakes (mostly LOTR at the moment) that I can't wait to get started on! And before I forget, just wanted to say, chocolate and ginger muffins? Not that nice, I think they would have been better if they only needed powdered ginger. The addition of stem ginger in syrup is a bit much in my opinion. 

Snapshots: The Cake is a Lie

And that’s about as far as my knowledge of Portal goes... I really must have a go at playing it sometime but first I need to finish Lego Lord of the Rings and try some other games. My attempts at playing Bioshock are going to be hilarious but you aren’t here to hear me talk about games so on to the actual subject of this post.

Last Sunday was my baby brother’s 21^st birthday, and since I’m an amazing and fantastic sister I kindly made him a birthday cake. And here it is, the Weighted Companion Cube!

You have no idea how awkward it was get the cake into my photography setup.
It was extremely heavy which made moving it tricky!

This cake is constructed out of four, 8 inch square Madeira cakes which have been sandwiched together with cream cheese frosting.  The whole thing was then covered in sugarpaste (which I coloured myself) and then all the decorations were appliquéd onto the surface. They were also made of sugarpaste and glued on with royal icing. Each piece was cut out by hand with a scalpel (well apart from the circles/hearts, obviously I used a cutter for those) and all I can say is thank the lord that icing is not like pastry so it doesn’t matter how many times you re-roll it!

Me and my mum are united in our hatred of people who just shove candles into cakes without a thought for the amount of effort that has gone into them or the overall design, so I baked a cupcake to hold the candle. This cupcake is a Peanut Butter Cup Cupcake V1 (recipe coming soon) which has been topped with some leftover frosting and a blue sugarpaste portal. Where is the orange portal? Well that’s a trade secret ;)

I learnt a lot making this cake, not only did I learn that sugarcraft will always take longer than you think it will; I also learnt some new techniques.  I learnt how to cover a square cake in sugarpaste (much harder than a circle cake, especially one this size!) and I learnt how to level cakes (a spirit level is your best friend). All in all I’m pretty darn proud of this cake, it was truly a labour of love but I think it was worth it!

Some of my recent baking

Wondering why I haven't updated since the New Year's Resolutions post?

Sadly my work hours have been all over the place the last week and shall be this week too, but next week they settle down and everything here should return to normal(ish). 

I have been baking though, today I made soda bread. Not entirely sure how it's turned out though, I accidently made it with strong white bread flour rather than plain flour! oops It has risen and it looks like the picture in the book, but I have no idea if it tastes OK. Guess I'll find out tomorrow, at which point I shall update you guys with the results of that particular mishap!

Edited to Add: Well I've tried the soda bread, and it's actually very nice! It tastes best when eaten as is with some butter/spread, as when toasted it developes a rather heavy texture. Apparently this is normal with soda bread, I'm not sure as it's years since I've eaten the stuff! So all in all this experiment hasn't gone too badly but I think it shall be improved by using the right flour next time! No pictures as it all got eaten!

I also made this

I made this a couple of days ago but I've had to wait to post it as it's my granddad's birthday cake and I have no idea if my grandparents ever look at this place! (I had to keep it off Facebook because they do use that and may have seen it.)

This is a chocolate cola cake which I have covered with green sugarpaste, and then appliqued the elephant and it's blanket using more sugarpaste. The red stripe has been covered with red sugar (secured with royal icing) and the blue areas have been decorated with star shaped sprinkles (makes a change from snowflakes!) The elephant's toe nails and tusk were made of white sugarpaste and the eye is an edible silver pearl. 

All in all I'm really proud of this cake, as while I've done modelling with sugarpaste before this is the first time I've ever covered a cake in the stuff. I think it's turned out rather well, I managed to roll it to an even thickness and it was big enough for the cake! I even coloured white icing green and grey myself (the blue/red were pre-coloured). The cake is on a plate because I completely forgot to go buy a proper cakeboard, oops. My only issue with this cake is that I should have rolled the icing a little thinner when I cut out the ear shape, as because it was a little thick the edges didn't curl properly when I ran my ball tool over the edge. But annoyingly the icing kept sticking to the worktop so I couldn't roll it any thinner easily, next time I'll dig out my mum's icing rolling pin (it's much smaller) and non-stick board.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas Everyone! 

Updates will be on hold for a few days while I enjoy Christmas and get started on my new job. But please stay tuned, there are going to be lots of exciting things happening here on Princess Cupcake in the new year.

To tide you over until then, here are a few pictures of some winter themed cakes I made.

These are the cupcakes I made as gifts for my family this year. They are spiced buttermilk sponges, topped with a vanilla buttercream. They have been decorated with royal icing snowflakes, snowflake sprinkles and my usual sprinkle of edible glitter.
I'm pretty proud of these, this was the first time I've ever worked with royal icing. Sadly the lighting in this picture does not show the buttercream to it's best advantage, it's actually a lovely minty green colour. However it's been very grey here in England these last few days which has made photography a challenge.

And these cupcakes were presents for my housemates last year, these are actually the same buttermilk sponges as this year. These ones have been iced with blue water icing, with piped snowflakes, more of the snowflake sprinkles and edible glitter. Please excuse the fact I put them back into the bun tin for photography, I can actually remember why I did. 

And finally this cake was made for a friend of mine a couple of years ago. This is a chocolate sponge, sandwiched and topped with vanilla buttercream (actually this is pretty much the colour of this years cupcakes!). It has been decorated with yet more snowflake sprinkles, silver balls, a dusting of icing sugar and a touch of edible glitter.

Can you tell that I like snowflakes? And glitter?
Merry Christmas everyone!

Snapshots- Halloween Treats

Snapshots –Halloween Treats

This post is something new I’ve decided to do, basically it’s just a random collection of pictures of bakes I’ve done at some point. These posts probably won’t happen very often but when I do post them I’ll try and keep all the images related to a particular theme, so to get the ball rolling on this new series let’s start with some Halloween bakes!

This post will be a bit short as I generally don’t do much Halloween themed baking since I don’t really bother with it, so most of these bakes are actually for parties that I was forced to attend.

In preparation for my review of the book “A Zombie Ate my Cupcake” I decided to try out one of the tutorials in it. As I’ve been keen to try making meringue frosting I decided to give the Ghost Cupcakes a whirl. These little guys were the result! The recipe was such fun to make, even if the meringue was really sticky! After I took this picture the icing I used for the faces melted a little in the heat of the kitchen, so the sad looking one on the top right now looks like it’s crying! Poor little guy! It wasn't until later that I noticed one of the spider biscuits had lost an eye, poor critter looks like he's had a terrible accident.

The following cakes were baked with my friends as our contribution to the catering of a Halloween party out housemates were throwing.

This was a yoghurt cake covered in water icing and an albino spider, designed to look like a gravestone. The cake turned out to be a bit more crumbly than we expected but I thought that looked good as it make the gravestone look weathered and old.

And now a selection of cupcakes, these ones were chocolate orange flavour. I mostly like the colour of the icing on these.

A selection of albino spiders...

And finally our “radiation” cakes, I honestly can’t remember what flavour cakes these were, probably chocolate. The design was loosely based on the hazard symbol for radiation and was created using the same chocolate dots used on the spiders.

Oh and because I had so much fun making them here is another picture of my Halloween fondant fancies.

That’s all for now I’m afraid; I really don’t do much Halloween themed baking the next snapshots should hopefully be much longer!