12 hours of cupcake decorating

So.... 12 dozen cupcakes are indeed insanity. I oscillate between having a total blast and wondering who volunteered for this job! I can tell it's going to be a long night.. my cousin wants hourly updates.... so I will add to this periodically throughout the night.

Cupcake design number 1: Corn on the Cob. It's that time of year - corn on the cob. Betcha these are the sweetest tasting ones you've ever had!

Cupcake design number 2: Fantastic Flowers. Ok, a repeat of a design. They are admittedly stunning though - fiddly and time consuming, but stunning nonetheless!

Project 3: Robot Cupcake Cake. This is the first big cupcake project - it is my custom order. I'm pleased that even the colour of the robot is metallic! Yea! if i am allowed to say it, i think it is beautiful :D This one was more elaborate than I had thought. had to cut out the pieces, then ice them, then coated them in sugar that i dyed grey/black. But hopefully this will make a little soon-to-be-four-year-old happy this weekend!

Pattern 4: Bake sale pies - as close to pastries as I will venture....

Design # 5: Canada Cupcakes

Whew! 12 hours of cupcakes. Not quite 12 dozen (ran out of steam!). but still have plenty for the sale.

My first cupcake cake order!

How exciting - someone has made a request/order! I am making a cupcake cake - a robot for a 4 year old's birthday! Currently, I am sitting in my sauna (aka my living room heated by the oven!)with about 10 dozen cupcakes cooked.... and more on the way. Insanity. Saturday is a big bake sale/fundraiser. Tomorrow night I am having friends over to help decorate the cupcakes. All the cupcakes are made from scratch, though i will likely cheat with the icing (shhhhhh..... don't tell anyone!).

I'm not sure what the profit margin would be, but if i could make a living making cupcakes, i think i would be satisfied for awhile.... but would need better equipment.... like a very large mixing bowl... you should have seen me try to cram a huge chocolate cupcake recipe into the bowl I have. cocoa powder all over me :P

I tried to show a senior today at work pictures of the fancy cupcakes I'm making (she told me she didn't think people would pay much for cupcakes...). She wouldn't look at first and I couldn't find the picture on my blackberry (to which she laughed and said "What use is technology?!"). But alas, she had to go upstairs to get something for me which gave me ample time to find several pictures. The ducks were what won her over... and now she is telling everyone to come to the sale!

will post lots of pictures on the weekend.

A little taste of heaven...

or deep fried cheesecake

(no I didn't make it).

I hung out with friends from the first permanent full time job that I once had. Well, permanent for me. I've had many work and volunteer jobs... I just get bored and have to try new things. This position was the longest that I had stayed in the same place for the same job description. Also, my colleagues became my first new family once I moved out on my own. They knew my strengths and weaknesses. We laughed, played pranks on each other, shared our stories, banged our heads against the wall, discovered iced green tea with ginseng together and marked every birthday with pizza and ice cream cake.

It was fun to see each other again. To learn about how each person has changed and grown and moved on with life. It was quite the reunion. And we tasted heaven! Good times, good times.

fondant: the limitless 'icing'

For my 26th birthday, my friends surprised me with a wonderful activity - cupcake decorating and learning how to make and use fondant! It was probably one of the best birthdays I have ever had. I really loved how they picked something that they knew makes me happy and went to all the work and fuss to prepare for it! I seriously have the best friends in the world :)

Fondant is a very sweet, modelling clay like icing. Virtually it makes cake decorating designs limitless. Egg whites, liquid glucose and icing sugar.

None of us had ever used fondant before so we long debated the correct consistency - it's quite thick and hard to mix.

Next we coloured the fondant with this teal colour. we decided not to make it even since all three of us loved the swirling effect. They bought me all the colours of food colouring :-) So now with fondant expertise and all the colours of the rainbow and more, I will be experimenting with all sorts of designs. Perhaps I'll get good enough to have a little side business of cupcake making! A rolling pin was left in another city, but thankfully A. found the perfect substitute - a tall glass with an udderly cute cow on it :-)

So much easier to "ice". We put the fondant on the cupcake top and the cut around it.

Next, we used tiny cookie cutters to cut stars from another batter of yellow swirled fondant. We thought we'd have a simple success for the first time rather than trying something really daring.

It was getting late, so we decided to just ice the the other cupcakes. Note the beautiful colours!!! How exciting is that! Also, note the perfect cupcake/cake storer thing! No more painfully slow rides from my house to Bible study with the driver verbally warning the cake holder as we approach stop signs and turns.

We can't have a cake decorating event without some sort of flop story. We mixed the remaining yellow and pink icing together to ice the last cupcake. Big mistake. Turned this really ugly "old lady pink" colour. Dreadful. Believe me, there was no fight over THAT cupcake. In fact, we all quickly agreed that we would not keep the remaining old lady pink icing. But alas, A. decided at the very last minute that C.'s garbage pail should be old lady pink. And perhaps the floor colour should be changed too :P

And now... for the final product.....

Flower Power

Can you guess what was used for the petals?

Whale of a Good time!

We took on an ambitious new cupcake design. Whales made with twinkies, black icing, thin chocolate cookies and a swirly blue icing. We discovered that if you melt icing (e.g. the black icing) and stick it in the freezer, it really does go hard.

The fun (and very messy part) was adding the water, the blue swirls.

Cake decorating in Chef de Cuisine's kitchen would be missing something without some sort of mishap. The completed whales took a dive of their own out of the safety of the freezer. A. Came to the rescue once again with her ever assuring comments of how we can fix it ;-)

And now - for the finished product.

Salads Galore!

Spring is time for Salads! Here of pictures I served on "Green night" (which basically came about by me realizing that i served GREEN food only. A yummy sauted kale and peanut butter salad, a spinach salad with carmelized green onions (and spices), and a cool cucumber and snow pea salad with fresh mint and other spices. All were yummy. My favourite was the Kale recipe.This salad was quite the interesting one! It had white kidney beans, warmed, tuna, onions spinach and lots of spices. Quite good and very filling! I highly recommend it!

Quack!

At last, I am taking time to update blogs! International cuisine has not recently made its way to my kitchen. However, my kitchen remains active as I try new things.

Recently, I came home after a tough day to a beautiful note and gift hanging on my front door. A dear friend had given me this beautiful cupcake decorating book. I am eager to try out all the new designs. My friend and I went to the bulk barn to buy all the supplies we will need and they are now in containers that add colour and fun to my kitchen. (Seriously, if the world was made of bulk food stores and book stores, I would be in heaven!).

Here is our first project.

I'd like to first make mention of the fact that despite a day of things going wrong, these cupcakes look perfect and tasted even better than they looked! You would never tell that I originally forgot half of the ingredients (as all my friends know- my brain went on a vacation to Honolulu this past week and left me behind).

The decor was prepared: marshmallows cut on a diagonal, jube-jubes and orange candies flattened to look like beaks and feet.

The first cupcake was put together successfully.... marshmallow for the tail, timbit for the head, lots of icing to stick it all together, lots of prayer that it wouldn't fall apart.

We were both rather excited that we got all the ducks pieced together without any heads or tails breaking! They hung out in the freezer for 20 minutes until the icing was good and solid.

The most challenging part of this whole adventure was to coat the ducks in yellow feather like icing. We hummed and hawed about whether we would make yellow icing or melt those fancy white chocolate yellow wafers. The later got a unanimous vote. Especially when we discovered that we didn't have any yellow food colouring. (The second duck face picture is blurry... but i couldn't resist putting it up here!)

Our pictures would not be complete with out a chick tail.

And now... for the final product....

Ok, so 'soon' is relative....

I know I keep promising pictures and stories... I keep baking/cooking, snapping photos and writing stories in my head... but surprisingly, they don't seem to just appear here.

(pictures will be posted by early next week)