My daughter designed these pretty cupcakes for her 7^th birthday party.  She originally wanted a big chocolate cake, but I managed to sway her away from that when I realised she’d be partying in the middle of heat wave and I didn’t fancy trying to transport a cake to the venue where the icing would be trying to literally flow off the cake as it melted.

She was quite happy to change her mind so long as it was pretty for the girls and blue for the boys – bless her.

She decided upon this design (Duck Egg Blue icing and cupcake cases with white sugarpaste roses) after flicking through some Google images of cupcakes.

She was inspired by some cupcakes that were designed to look like the blue Tiffany boxes with the white ribbons and some other pastel birthday/celebration cupcakes with sugarpaste flowers on.  I am still quite astounded that someone so young has developed an acute eye for the finer things in life – seems a plastic bag from Claire’s Accessories may no longer good enough.

I used my standard no-fail vanilla cupcake recipe as the base.  I have now worked out that my Kitchen Aid Ice Cream Scoop (which came free with Val) provides the exact cake batter to cupcake case volume ratio to get a cupcake that (almost) perfectly fills the case .  Not sure what volume that actually is per case, but I know the cake batter should never fill more than half the case.  The batter made 20 cupcakes which meant I’d have 2 spare for emergencies.

Have to admit that I was quite smug with myself for selecting  some Blue Cupcake Cases from Squires Kitchen that exactly matched the Duck Egg blue of my Renshaw Sugarpaste (2 x 250g) – more luck than judgement though.

I then rolled out the sugar paste to around 2mm thick and used a 58mm round cookie cutter to cut out the blue circular sugarpaste toppers.  I stuck these on to the cakes with some apricot jam (slightly diluted and heated) before smoothing onto the cake with a cake smoother.

I had started preparing the flowerpaste roses days in advance as I had to dust off a cobwebby part of my brain where I had stored what I had been taught on my last day of Cake Decorating School nearly a year ago now.  Flowerpaste (or sugar florist paste) is a type of sugarpaste that can be rolled out much thinner than standard sugarpaste which makes it great for modelling.

After a couple of dodgy starts I managed to get a bit of a production line going, averaging one rose every 10-15 minutes.  Unfortunately It’s far too much information to write a ‘how to’ here,  But, when I get some proper time I’ll try and make and post a video of how you do it & what kit you need and I’ll then update this post with a link for information.

Next I punched a hole in the top of each cake the diameter of the base of the rose and secured it in place with some royal icing.  On reflection, buttercream would have probably been a better choice, and I still wake up in a cold sweat thinking of all these children biting into these cakes and losing a tooth on a rock of royal icing hidden within.

After the obligatory singing of “Happy Birthday” and blowing out candles. the cupcakes were each put in a cupcake pod (search on Amazon) for safe passage home in party bags by the party guests.

Overall very pleased with the results and I think Popsy was too.  Happy birthday darling 🙂