Bright Flower Cupcakes

Just a quick cupcake blog, they didn't exactly go how I planned but I learnt some things.

First I made a smaller amount of marshmallow fondant as I only needed it for decorations this time (125g melted marshmallows, 250g icing sugar, 1 tablespoon of water). I will be doing a complete Marshmallow Fondant post soon!

I split the fondant into 3 balls (about 112g of fondant each) and coloured them yellow, orange and purple. I used normal food colouring and it took a lot of drops of food colouring and kneading to get them bright colours, so maybe more ideal for pastel colours. I've read that gel colouring is better but I don't have any yet. I wrapped each one up in glad wrap and put in zip locks bags inside a container over night.

The next day I rolled the fondant out and cut out 90 flowers  (I needed much less than this but I have had petals of the flowers break off when I pick them up and they last for ages so not bad to have leftovers) and made some little balls for the centers as well. My push cutters are from Something For Cake. They got a little bit sticky and hard to work with by the time I was finished so I wouldn't plan to make anymore than that. It took me about 2 hours.

Next day was the cupcakes! Now I had recently found this new recipe that I wanted to try out for myself - Perfect Vanilla Cupcakes and the title is not wrong, they came out perfect! I have never had cupcakes all rise so evenly before. I highly recommend that recipe! I made 12 normal cupcakes and 12 mini cupcakes (not photographed). The yellow cupcake wrappers are smaller as they're just a different brand.

Then finally on the day I wanted to serve them, I made some Cream Cheese Frosting to pipe out on top of the cupcakes. Now this is where I went wrong, I got 'lite' cream cheese instead of the regular one and didn't realise till later that the lite one has more water so therefore making my icing not hold it's shape. I piped it out on two of the cupcakes and it proceeded to melt down which doesn't look the best. I used a silicone piping bag and a Wilton 1M piping tip.

So I made some regular buttercream and attempted to try again and it didn't work out much better (probably worse really) and it was more yellow which I didn't like either. I have never piped icing out before though so I guess it was an okay first attempt but I will definitely have to work on it! I just stuck the flowers on top and 'glued' the centres of the flowers on with White Chocolate Writing Icing, it just comes in a tube and it's really good for sticking things together and tastes nice as well.

Any questions, leave them below!