Simple cupcake decoration

All you need is love

I love cupcakes, both baking/decorating and eating them. They offer you so much in terms of creativity and don't make you feel as guilty as eating huge slices of cake. Whats more, each cupcake can be decorated in a different way, with different flavours, making it so much more than a whole chunk of cake. Not to say that I don't love cake, but cupcakes sit just a teensy bit higher on my lust list than cake :p
Today, I'm gonna show you how you can tszuj up a cupcake in 3 easy steps:

1. Bake your cupcakes in your favourite flavours. 
2. Pipe butter cream icing/frosting on the top ( you can find the recipe for butter cream frosting here
3. Cut out hearts out of red fondant and place them on top. You could also make teeny roses from fondant and use them as 3-D toppers. Viola, you red heart cupcakes are ready.   

Go on, Get Set Bake them :) 

Mini ombre cakes

Ombre on my mind

Some time ago, I caught the ombre craze. For those in the dark, (I was too, until lately), ombre is a french word that means shaded, a graduation of a shade, from light to dark. This translated into cake language, means a cake with layers of different shades of one colour. I was eager to experiment and the results didn't disappoint me. I chose pink for this experiment but you can choose any colour under the rainbow. The possibilities are endless. Here's how you can create your own ombre mini cake. 

Ingredients:

• Recipe and ingredients of your favourite vanilla/yellowcake
• Round cookie cutters in your desired size
• Food colouring
• Buttercream icing

Method: 

• After you make your batter for the cake, divide it into three or four batches and add one drop of your desired food colouring to the first bowl, 2 drops to the second bowl and so on to get a graduated tint across the bowls.
• Now bake your cake in different pans for each colour.
• After the cake has cooled, take your cookie cutter and press into the cake, getting circles of each colour.
• Stack the colours on top of each other, going from light to dark, sandwiching them with a filling of butter cream frosting. I also sandwiched a dark slice between two light ones, so you can experiment as you please. 
• Pipe a swirl or a rose on the topmost layer and dig in.

So get set and bake it, it will be a crowd-pleaser for sure :)

Butterfly cake

Butterfly fly away

Fancy this for a lil one's b'day to make her day extra special :)

Black Sheep Cookies

Counting sheep?

I love decorating cookies. Till a while ago, cookies to me conjured up images of either standard cookie-shaped biscuits or plain round mounds of yummness, occasionally spattered with chocolate chips, fruits etc. But all that changed the day I discovered cookies decorated with royal icing. Soon I realised cookies can be a work of art by themselves. 
While mine are nowhere near art, yet, I do manage to have fun with them and hope to inspire you to do the same. I recently joined a group on FB that gets all 'black sheep' together in a forum. The ones who paved their own path, didn't go with the flow and followed their heart. Admit it, we all have a bit of a black sheep in us :) If you think you are a fellow black sheep, do join the group on FB here
For the very first meet (oh the stories and people, I felt more grey than black compared to some of the amazing people I met and their adventures :) ), I wanted to bake the members something. Any excuse to try and make something yum I tell you :)
I wanted to make cupcakes and decorate them as black sheep, but kept that for another day thanks to transport issues. So cookies they were and I came up with this:

Black beauties

 You can personalize your cookies any way you want. For instance, I used a basic sugar cookie recipe and baked the cookies. After that, all I did was flood the cookies in black Royal icing (recipe here) and then once it dried, I piped white dots on the edges and the lettering to commemorate the event. You need not be a piping expert for flooding and dots. The text requires a lil bit of practice, but if I can do it with no training whatsoever, so can you :)
Happy cookie decorating folks. 

Eye Candy

'Eye' got candy

I have been wanting to do a step by step tutorial for long now but kept pushing it off for lack of time. Today, I decided to stop procrastinating and get down to it. Today, I am going to show you'll something that is very simple to make and so versatile in its uses. I came across this idea a long time ago, but it wasn't until I got an order for them that I got down to doing it. This is a great exercise that you can indulge in, come summer, with your kids as they will have a good time making them and an even greater time playing with them, of course, most of them will end up in their tummies before going on dessert projects :)
So without further ado, here they are. I have used them on smiley cookies, but their applications are endless. After all, a couple of baby blue eyes can up the aww factor of almost anything. 
First, lets get started with the basic recipe for the icing. I use royal icing as it sets hard and lasts for a long time, some, almost a year if stored properly. I used the basic recipe found on Joy of Baking and tweaked it a little to suit me. You can experiment with the host of recipes available online once you get comfortable with it. I prefer to use meringue powder rather than raw egg whites as many debate the factor of raw egg whites containing food-borne pathogens such as salmonella. Better safe than sorry right. Here's the recipe for the Royal Icing:

Ingredients:

1. One cup icing sugar
2. 3/4 tablespoon Meringue powder
3. One teaspoon vanilla extract
4. 1/4 cup warm water 
5. Food colouring in baby blue and black

Blue-eyed treats

Method:

• Whisk the sugar and meringue powder.
• Add the vanilla extract and the water, bit by bit, whisking as you do so.  (Even though the recipe calls for 1/4 cup of water, you might need much lesser depending on the consistency, so add a little at a time)
• Beat the mixture on medium speed for about 5 to 6 minutes. You will notice that the consistency is runny at first, but stiffer as you beat.
• You can test if the icing is ready by using the ten second rule. You do so by lifting the whisker and letting the icing drop back into the bowl in ribbons. If the surface of the mixture becomes smooth in 10 seconds, you are good to go. If it is quicker than ten seconds, the icing is too runny and you need to add more icing sugar and if it is much longer, add a bit more water. 
• Divide the icing in batches and colour them accordingly.  You will need more white, a little less blue and much lesser black.
• Fill them into your individual piping bags. I use butter paper, roll them into cones and pipe away, but you can use various icing tips available. Make sure it has a small round opening for this recipe. Here's an example of a good tip from Wilton.
• Line your counter with butter/parchment paper and start piping like so:

Leave the candy eyes on the counter-top to dry. They might take anywhere from 4 hours to a day or so depending on the humidity of the area you are in. Once they are completely dry, peel them off carefully and store them in an airtight container. To attach them to cookies, dab a tiny dot of royal icing on the backside of the cookies and stick them where you want. 

For instance, for the smiley face cookies, flood the cookies with your choice of coloured royal icing, once they dry, attach the eyes, pipe out smiles, a nose and eyelashes if you please and there you have it, a smiley face cookie.Experiment with consistencies according to your design.