A giant cupcake way to say thank you

A regular customer of ours, let's call her S, loves loves loves our giant cupcakes.  She's ordered a classic one or two, a sticky toffee pudding one and now a thank you one.  This was for her child's nursery (kindergarten) teachers because he was leaving to go to a different nursery.  I had free reign, and was keen to try out a technique I had seen on Pinterest. It was a novel way to make a shaped top on the cupcake, using a fondant 'snake'.

You crumb-coat the cupcake as you normally would, then roll out a long snake of fondant and wrap it around the top half.  Then you place over your fondant top as you would when covering a cake.  If you click this link, you should hopefully see one of my pins on the topic.  (Have I told you how much I'm loving Pinterest?  It's like having a wall full of post-it notes, but on the computer!  And you can add to it whenver and however much you like! So so fun, and kind of addictive.  Check me out at Pinterest and see what I mean)

Then you roll out enough of another colour of fondant to cover the base, cut it to the size you need (I needed 3" x19" for this particular time) and roll it onto a rolling pin to transport it, then roll it off onto your giant cupcake.  That probably sounds super-confusing, so check the link above to find the photo tutorial.

I have embossed the greeting for two reasons - I really like embossing and I haven't successfully used my alphanumeric cutters/moulds yet.   The whole cake was then sprinkled with a bit of white fairy dust, and we're good to go!

I'm really pleased with the way it turned out, and the feedback from both the customer and the recipients was great!  Hope you do too 

Giant, sticky, toffee and delicious.

Last year I was lucky enough to make two giant cupcakes for a lady called S.  One was a sticky toffee one, the other vanilla.  Apparently her husband loved the sticky toffee one so much that she got in touch this year to ask me to repeat the magic.  Woo hoo, was I excited!  

I hadn't done a giant cupcake for a while now, and wanted to make this one a bit different for him.  We had some delicious dates in the house, so they got finely chopped and added to the batter.  As the home-made toffee sauce colours the icing a beige shade, I felt teddy bear brown and dark brown would be the best contrast I could offer.  So I got to work with my stars, plaques and gold sparkle spray to create a cupcake worthy of a birthday man.  This time I used chocolate flavoured brown sugarpaste for the base, rather than chocolate itself, and the same toffee buttercream for the middle filling as well as the outer decoration.  A couple of chocolate champagne bottles and we were good to go.

And I believe he loved it!  Happy Birthday Mr S!

Zoe's 10th birthday, part 1 - giant cupcake

I love repeat business.  It feels so good to be included in a families celebrations, and thought of when they have a special occasion.  In this case, I was asked to do a cupcake decorating party for the lovely Zoe for her 10th birthday.  And also to provide the birthday cake.  She's a fan of chocolate, so it was to be a naked chocolate giant cupcake and the guests were to decorate it themselves.  But then she saw and enjoyed the Carrot Cake I made them for Christmas (which looked similar to the Red Velvet one I blogged about recently), and decided she'd like me to decorate her birthday cake after all.  

As it was to be a chocolate cake, she chose chocolate icing too, and pink and blue decorations.  Here's another lovely way to use the plaque cutter from my last post - I really like it.  And I'm loving the new bow cutters I bought, I feel like I'm getting the hang of them.  The little name plates are for the party (see next post)...

A man who knows what he wants, how refreshing

It has to be very pink, very sparkly and very girly - and have white hearts and butterflies and can you do the hearts on sticks?  And could you off-set the cake and pipe Happy 21st birthday Karen around the plain cake board, evenly in the space remaining, in pink and white if possible?  It's all she's wanted and talked about for weeks, so it has to be right.  Oh, and do you colour the sugarpaste yourself?  Yes?  So can that be pale pink and the icing to be hot pink?  I think that's all, oh and can you deliver it please?

Phew.  A man who knows what he wants - quite a nice change actually ;)

 

Giant cupcakes are not just for giants...

I have the email address on the blog and our Facebook page, and was lucky enough to get an email earlier this week asking me to do not one, but two, giant cupcakes for yesterday.  After checking the diary to see what other baking commitments I had, and the calendar to see what family commitments we had - I said, sure thing.

The customer was a new one, and wanted one sticky toffee giant and one vanilla with pink decorations giant cupcake.  I hadn't done any flavour other than vanilla before but was confident about the toffee as it's a similar flavour to caramel and butterscotch and I'm adept at them.  I used the vanilla cake recipe and swapped 2/3rds of the sugar for light brown muscovado sugar and it was good.  Baked up the same and smelt great.  For the icing, I searched through my books and folder (the folder is indivual random recipes that are printed from emails, or other books or other people or cut from magazines) and was beginning to panic as there were no specifically toffee recipes.  They seemed more caramel to me, and that's not what I was after.  Then I found it - Fiona Cairn's toffee buttercream recipe.  I had copied it out of this book as I liked the sound of only some of the cakes and designs she had featured.
The recipe required you to make a sauce with sugar and butter, then add cream then when cool you added it to the buttercream  I had to play about with the texture a little, so it was solid enough to pipe, but wow - did it taste good!! 

I had also made a chocolate shell for the bottom of the cupcake for the first time.  This was done by melting 200g of milk chocolate and painting it on the inside of my silicone mould.  I popped it in the freezer for 10 minutes, then painted on another layer, and so on times in total.  I turned it upside down, made a wish, then it popped right out in one piece!  Phew.  Next time I shall use a bit more chocolate, as it seemed a bit thin in places.

This is a vanilla cake with vanilla (and a round of lemon curd buttercream) buttercream, strawberry jam filling and a spray of flowers.  I think I really need to practice making flowers out of sugarpaste or flowerpaste, to give a little more variety in what I can offer.  But the customer loved it,  and that is what matters most.

Happy giant birthday Laura

A friend of a friend saw our photos on our Facebook page and like them so much, she requested a giant cupcake for her daughter's birthday.  The only requirement?  Pink! 

Using the last blue and white one as a guide, I again rolled out fondant to cover the base and used it to make the disc at the front, so they matched.  Her name was Laura, so I got to use my new embossing set to do the disc.  I wanted to do pink icing on the top half, so planned to use white for the decorations - sprayed with gold lustre to make them stand out more. 

I was quite pleased with this one, as I managed to make the rose swirls smaller and tighter, and thus fit 2 rows all the way around.  I delivered it earlier this morning, and the client was thrilled.  Some of her colleagues had waited around to see it too, and were also impressed  So pleased.  Then I got a comment on the Facebook page photo to say that not only did the birthday girl love it, it tasted great too - yippee!

7th birthday number 2, for Anna

Here the brief was slightly less strict, but nonetheless a challenge.  A giant cupcake for a girl that wasn't too girly, and had to feature blue.  After some discussion, it was decided that the icing was to be cream with blue stars, and also vanilla flavour cake and icing.

Ok, here goes.  I had recently come across a few more recipes for giant cupcakes but was loathe to try a new one for an order, in case it went wrong and I wouldn't have time or ingredients to re-bake.  So I went for my trusted recipe and started early in the morning, to allow the baked cake plenty of time to cool.  So far, so good.

Uh oh - not so good.  When I thought the cakes (baked in 2 separate halves, as you do) were cool enough, I tried to remove the silicon mould from the base.  Seriously bad move, as not all the cake pulled away from the side of the mould.  This meant that there wouldn't be a smooth, shaped base to my giant cupcake - but what could I do to rectify it??  Lucky that I had started baking early, because after the nursery walk I had to dash home to re-bake the base!

And as if that wasn't issue enough, I then had to calculate how much time I had available before needing to collect the girls from nursery and school versus how long it would take to mix up then bake the cake.  And the answer?  They would both need to be done at the exact same time - aaarrrggghhh.  So, I waited a bit in order to put the cake in a bit later and for a bit lower a temperature, then left it baking while I did the school dash.  Woo hoo - it worked!

So to decorate - I had seen a photo somewhere that showed a giant cupcake base cut in half and jammed then jammed and buttercreamed in the middle and jammed again halfway through the top half.  I thought that was a great idea, because - to me anyway - it seems like there's far too much of a cake to filling ratio.  So I jammed the base halfway through, then had seen a video (was trying to find it there, to give you the link, but no luck - sorry) on how to use fondant to ice the bottom half.  It didn't look to hard, so I tried it.  And it worked!  I then crumb-coated the top half and popped it in the fridge to set.

I hadn't thought to crumb-coat a giant cupcake before, but had seen it done (perhaps on the same video as above?) and it seemed very sensible.  It also gave me time to tidy the table in order to do the icing roses and decorations later on.  And so we come to the finished product - they loved it!!!

Can you see I used my new toys again?  Floral embossing mat and alphabet embossing set, as mentioned in the previous 7th birthday post.  Oh, and a little aside - you may (or maybe not) be surprised to learn that this and the other 7th birthday girl met in utero, but haven't really met up again since.  Odd the way things work out.  We're back in touch again now, so that will probably change soon ;)

Giant 19th birthday

The daughter of a friend was turning 19, and her mother had requested a giant cupcake in red/white/pink with bows for her some months ago - knowing Sammi would love it.  Hence the practice one a month or so ago, to get the recipe right and work out icing techniques and so on. 

Collection was set for Sunday lunchtime, so I would usually  have baked Friday night, decorated Saturday night but as it was a Friday night, Mr Becca was in the kitchen.  No bother, I woke up a little bit early (weekends usually mean a lie till around 815am, woo hoo) and baked Saturday morning.  This would still give a fresh cake, but also allow it time to cool fully before icing and setting.  We were off out to a friend's half-way across the country (weeeell, not technically but a good hour or so away, and our country is kinda small) for lunch, so time was of the essence.

So to Saturday night.  I had found YouTube videos for making bows out of fondant (I really liked this one, because she made it look so easy) but it wasn't. 

As you can see, the bows I made look nothing like the one the girl made, but with enough practice I think I could nearly do it.  Or I could save myself the bother, and buy some ready-made by an expert off eBay ;)

I had Googled giant cupcakes to see how others decorated them, as I felt the rose style swirls looked great and wanted to see how other bakers placed them around the cake.  That done, I did my best.  And feel that I could do better.  Still, it turned out well and Sammi and her mum were thrilled with it. 

The last one I had made was too tall for any carrier I owned, however I was lucky enough to find a long roll of cellophane and used this to wrap the cake for transport, thus...

 Not ideal, but not bad.  And it survived the car ride home, so all's well that ends well.

Giant cupcake, first & second try

I had been keen to try out a giant cupcake, as I'd seen many other bakers make excellent work of them.  I found a silicon mould, with the help of an old colleague who now runs Cissyface Vintage, at a local The Works store and got to work. 

Unfortunately it doesn't come with a recipe, but rather says to use a box or two of packet mix and blah blah blah.  Well, that wasn't gonna happen at my house, so I tried a full batch of cupcake mix, sprayed the two halves of the mould with oil and went for it.  And boy, what a failure that was!  The mix was short by nearly half so I basically baked a pancake and a rugby ball shape - pretty darn useless.  Tasted good, but no-one wanted odd-shaped bits of cake.  And strangely, it didn't really come out of the mould well at all, despite the spray of oil.

So I emailed a couple of fellow bakers on Facebook who seemed friendly, and they were kind enough to share their cake recipe specifically for giant cupcakes.  I chose one and went for it.  And it worked!  And I even forgot to spray the moulds this time, but it came out almost perfectly (you may notice at the top of the top section, there's a tiny bit that isn't quite right).

I felt like orange for the icing (and neon orange for the glitter), and tried to make it a bit runnier than usual so that it may take the shape of the mould and run down the bottom half slightly.  Well, that had been my plan.  But it didn't quite work out that way...

So I added gold-touched butterflies and the words 'Becca Bakes' and declared us good to go.  The Team loved it, and were very impressed - with the look and the taste.  I found the best way to cut it was to slice up first the top half, then the bottom half.  And it had to be separated into halves to fit into a cake tin for keeping - not the tidiest thing to do, but hey, needs must.

And I'm pleased to say that it got good feedback on Facebook too.  While I'm fully aware that it isn't the best giant cupcake you've ever seen, we don't claim to be the best.  But we do have fun, and make great-tasting cake, so as Meatloaf once said, 'Two outta three ain't bad'.