Say It With Cupcakes

What present do you get  for the person who has everything, or the person you need to give something to but don't really know well enough to chose? If what you want is something personal, thoughtful and made specially with them in mind, then  it's time to think cupcakes.

Right now it's 'end of term' and several teachers in the past week have recieved a gift box of cupcakes all tied with ribbon and personalised for them ~ and it's a pretty safe bet that's a gift they'll always remember. 

And talking of gifts .... cupcakes can be themed for any occasion. If you think of each cupcake as an individual canvas, just waiting to decorated, the the possibilities are endless. Of course you can also add names, messages, models or photos to your cakes, the list of potential cupcake toppers is really only limited by your imagination.

Just take a look at the french themed cupcakes to the left. They were made as a bit of a joke present for a 40th birthday boy who lived in France. Each one is different, from cheese to wine to frogs to snails - and he loved them (as did all his friends and family who apparently scoffed the lot before you could say Oh, la la).

So the next time you have something special to say, or someone special to say it to why not be a little different and say it with cupcakes.

If the Shoe Fits ....

Shoes ... for many girls shoes are the ultimate fashion statement. 

Mark Twain said 'Clothes maketh the man' but when it comes to the fairer sex I reckon it's the shoes that maketh the girl ~ or rather the perfect cake topper for a girls cake.

Flat, heeled, strappy, peep-toed ~ the combinations are endless ~ then there's the option of having your cake topper personalised by adding a name and age to the shoe cake toppers, great for birthdays ~ and of course it doesn't have to be your real age ~ if you want to be 21 for the 10th year running that's entirely up to you.

Then again why stop at shoes when you can accessorise with handbags ~ matching sets if you like.

And if you're looking for something smaller in the shoe line, a shoe cupcake topper for instance then we've got that covered too with the cute little 2" pairs of shoes we've used on these cupcakes ~ and when you're dealing with shoes that size you really can have as many pairs as you want.

Bling up your Cupcakes

It used to be that the only decoration found on a cupcake was a sugar flower or a smartie ~ oh how times have changed.  Nowadays cupcakes, like their big brothers the full sized cake, are canvasses for artistic outlet.

As a term, 'Cake Jewellery' is still fairly new but its popularity is growing. The addition of wired and beaded cake toppers to birthday and wedding cakes has become pretty common in the last few years, and with most cake jewellery being bespoke it's a sure fire way of making sure your cakes and cupcakes are totally unique.

Designs range from using a few clustered beads to form a pretty centrepiece to a cupcake, to a fountain of shimmering beads to create a real 'wow' factor. The beauty with cake jewellery is that you're not constrained by cutters or shapers, your only limit is your imagination and the beads and wire you can lay your hands on. 0.2mm wire is best for multi-beaded cupcake creations like the one above as it's very flexible and can be easily moulded into shape. For creations using heavier beads Hamilworth Paper Covered Wire is great, it's sold in most cake decorating shops and comes in a variety of thicknesses.

But what about the Hygiene / Health and Safety aspect of wires and beads in food I hear you ask. Not a problem, the birth of the mini cake pick means you can insert wires to your hearts content, though removing them before eating the cake is (hopefully) an obvious given.

Thanks for reading, and if this has whetted your appetite in any way and you fancy having a go yourself why not attend one of our classes, held frequently in the Beds, Bucks and Herts regions.

The View from the Loo

X Marks the Spot

Thank God for the internet. It means that when I get a request for an unfamilar cake subject I can look it up ~ which saves the whole looking blank and playing 20 questions thing.

So when an email request for a birthday cake in the style of the X-Box logo came through a few days ago that's exactly what I did, and 5 mins of googling later not only was I familiar with the X Box logo I was able to say 'no problem', one shiny silver and green domed cake coming right up.

It has to be said that sponge cake isn't the most forgiving material to sculpt, it's soft, springy and full of air - which makes it great to eat but not so easy to carve a smooth curve on - and the more you try the more cake you carve - which makes it perfectly possibly to lop off most of your cake in the search for perfection. The trick is to recognise this and use the other tools at your disposal to fill in the imperfections, namely buttericing and sugarpaste.

Think of buttericing as plaster and sugarpaste as wallpaper - the buttericing smooths out any lumps and bumps and the sugarpaste gives a uniform finish. For this cake I used a white sugarpaste and coloured in myself using a touch of black food colouring. As a tip it's easy to colour your own pastel colours in icing but for strong colours i.e black, deep blues, greens, reds etc it's worth buying the pre-coloured sugarpaste as otherwise, whilst you may end up with perfectly sculpted upper arms due to all the kneading you're unlikely to get an even colour in your icing.

The shiny silver finish to this cake was achieved by using a pearlised spray ~ they're available in most good cake decorating shops now and the ones I use are the PME Edible Lustre Sprays, they come in a whole range of colours and are great if you need to give anything a silver or gold finish.

For me, the best bit with any cake is seeing the recipients face when they see it for the first time, and it's especially great when they takes the time afterwards to say how much they enjoyed it, which is exactly what happened with this cake ~ only this being the 21st Century and social media being king the compliment didn't come by post but by twitter.

Flat as a Cupcake

One of the most frequent questions I get asked is how to get cupcakes to come out of the oven with a flat top, rather than something that resembles a miniature volcano. Without fail, the answer to this connundrum lies in building a good relationship with your oven ...

Oven temperatures are not an exact science, in fact rarely does the temperature on the dial match the temperature in the oven ~ and the differences can be extreme. My current oven cooks around 10C above the stated temperature, my Mum's is at least 20C above. The upshot of this is that while a recipe calls for a temperature calls for 180C cooking temperature the actual temperature your oven is cooking at may bear no relation.

This gives rise to a challange, but one that is simple to resolve using either of the following methods:

1. Invest in  / or borrow an oven thermometer and measure the temperature in your oven.

2. Trial and error, if your cakes are getting burnt or rising more than you'd like, or if they're not cooking in the stated time turn the temperature of your oven up or down 10C and see what result you get, then keep experimenting until you get the result you want.

Of course just because you have discovered the optimum temperature for flat topped cupcakes doesn't mean you shouldn't turn the heat up occasionally. After all there aren't many things that beat the crispy crunch of those volcano like cupcake tops, still warm from the oven.