Sunflowers in November

Hello, Cupcake! provides inspiration for creating beautifully designed and themed cupcakes without making everything from scratch. Even the authors said that they prefer canned frosting rather than homemade, “We have yet to find a homemade frosting that can do what a store-bought one does. That’s why we use store-bought frosting right out of the can for most of our projects.” (216) What I like about this book is that it allows me to focus less on making the actual food itself and more on something I possess less skill in, decorating. So for my first entry I decided to start with more of the basic skills before I dived head first into the world of cupcake embellishment.

 While I will say Hello, Cupcake! does an excellent job at explaining and giving directions on their cupcakes, it does fool you to think that these very creative cakes possibly could be easy to make. The pictures in the cookbook give away the idea that these cupcakes are simple to replicate but I would not be as easily fooled. With that in mind, I will tell you guys how I created my sunflower cupcakes.

I started my procedures by using box-cake mix and constructing the cupcakes. I consider this step of the most basic of skills when it comes to making these treats, which I believe it pretty self-explanatory and I won’t go into much detail.

One tip that I feel I do need to include in this post is that when cracking the eggs that go into the cake batter, crack them on a flat surface, never on the side of the bowl or on the edge of a counter. When an egg is cracked on a bowl or side of a counter fragments of the egg shell can go into the egg causing problems with shells in the cake. Just a little food for thought.

Next after the cupcakes have baked and cooled completely, I started on my decorating journey. The first step written in the sunflower recipe of Hello, Cupcake! is to tint a portion of the frosting green and smooth the frosting over the baked cupcakes. (216) Though the book said to leave the icing at room temperature, I thought the frosting was too stiff to work with when adding food coloring, so I popped it into the microwave for 10-15 seconds just to loosen it up.

When choosing what time of food coloring to go with, you have a variety of options. A few of the most popular would be gel, liquid or even powder. As it was what I readily had on hand I used liquid, but I would have preferred to use gel food coloring as it give more vibrant colors with less of the product used.

Anyways at the beginning of this cookbook, it gives you tips and tricks on how to frost your miniature masterpieces. Personally whenever I have frosted anything I have put a dollop of frosting on top, spread it around a little bit, and called it a day. Finally I have figured out the key to perfectly frosted desserts, and that is to use not only the right amount of frosting but the correct tool, an offset spatula. First add more frosting than you would think to, to the top of the cake. Next using your offset spatula gently move from the center of the dollop outwards until the icing is to the cupcake liner but not touching it and is even and smooth on the surface. I found that by rotating the cupcake in my hand while holding the liner and frosting it made the frosting easier to smooth and was faster in the process which is essential when frosting 24 cupcakes (believe me it is a lot more cupcakes than you think). Another tip would be that if you feel the topping needs to be more even, wipe your spatula clean and level as needed.

After you have frosted your cupcake you are then going to place different sized Oreos randomly on the top, these will serve as the base for our sunflowers. Now the tricky part, piping the petals. As you can see in principal this cupcake should fairly easy to follow, but the execution is easier said than done. Start by tinting the remaining frosting a bright and sunny yellow. I would have preferred a more vibrant color but I would have used the whole small bottle of liquid food coloring to dye it the color I would have wanted. After this take ½ cup of yellow frosting and color it orange, for this you dye it with red food coloring to create orange (I did this option) or just use orange food coloring. Next put a gallon sized Ziploc bag into a large cup folding the top over lip of the cup. Using a rubber spatula for ease, put the orange frosting into one side of the Ziploc bag, then put the yellow frosting into the other side of the bag.

Notice how in the picture the orange is on one side while the yellow frosting is on the other.

After gently pushing the icing into a corner of the baggie, flatten out the corner. Then using clear tape reinforce the corner with a few pieces of tape, this should make the next step easier and won’t leave you with pieces of plastic in your cupcake’s decorations. Out of this corner cut a small inward V, and you are ready to start piping flower petals.

For the under-layer of petals I made the mistake of originally piping on the side of the Oreos. This made the petals fall and were not at all what I wanted them to be. This can be solved by piping these petals on to the top edge of the Oreos. Start by laying the V-tip flat onto the Oreo’s surface and creating a line that should look like the petals of a sunflower. Repeat this around the Oreo and then do a second layer on the inside of the first.  After you finish all the Oreos, you will have a whole bouquet of sunflowers!

Last of all and this is probably the most important thing I can say. These decorations take practice, even from my first cupcake to the last one I did I would say I improved drastically. Don’t give up even if it’s frustrating, you will get better! These are a few of my finished products. (Left is the books picture, right it my cupcakes)

Expectation

1st Cupcake Try

Last Cupcake Try

Thanks for reading, Sierra Foster

What ideas do you have about how to make box-cake mix taste more homemade?

Richardson, Alan, and Karen Tack. Hello, Cupcake! New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008. Print.