Say it with a gift cake

What's a birthday without gifts and cake? So why not kill two birds with one stone and present your lucky friend with a gift-cake?

Inspired by Sugarbloom's Tall Cupcake Tutorial, I thought I'd try my hand at covering a cupcake with fondant to make a birthday gift for a special friend. Never mind the fact that I had never covered an entire cake with fondant before....

Well, 9 cupcakes later I think I nailed it:
The mini cake is actually one of my lemon delicious cupcakes, coated in white chocolate ganache and pale pink fondant. I didn't make the pink and white flowers myself, but I did pipe the monogram (another first with Royal Icing mix).

The cake was packaged in a matching gift box with gorgeous Cristina Re vellum paper and brown grosgrain ribbon.

I sacrificed a lot of cupcakes along the way, but I did learn some things in the procees:

ganache is better than buttercream under fondant
you really do need to let the ganache set before you try to smooth fondant over it
fondant isn't as scary as I thought it was
one mini cake is fine - I would go insane making a whole wedding order!
a gift cake really is a wonderful present to give your friend!

Happy birthday Lea!

Comments

Georgette G said…

These are very cute stuff. And I am guessing they taste good too. I think people would appreciate it if you would show how to work with fondant

Saturday, 25 June, 2011

Olive's Carrot Cupcakes {Recipe}

"Mummy, I'm hungry. Hungry for something sweet." Sound familiar? If only it were "Mummy, I'm hungry for green vegetables!" Sometimes getting kids to eat something healthy is a battle. The harder you try, the more they resist. We've been pretty lucky with Olive - she devours fruit. And while she's adamant she'll never eat a tomato (too many Charlie and Lola bedtime stories), she will eat green beans, peas and corn (and sometimes raw broccoli!) without fuss. The one veg she absolutely adores though are carrots. A carrot stick is a great snack for a hungry preschooler but when they're pining for something sweet, why not make them something healthy and sweet and bake some mini carrot cupcakes? These mini cupcakes are based on Stephanie Alexander's Simple Carrot Cake from The Cook's Companion . I like this recipe a lot because it uses olive oil which has lots of health benefits. If you have a food processor, you could ea...

My blog is making me fat

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How to make sugar carrot cupcake decorations

The internet gods have not been kind to us this past week. Apparently a static-y phone line can interfere with our ADSL connection, putting to bed any hopes I had to bring you this tutorial and Mr Di-licious completing an online test for his law course. Sigh. At least I had my iPhone - I was still connected to the world so to speak, even if in a limited, small screen kind of way. But I digress. As promised, here is a 'tutorial' to help you make the cute as a button sugar carrots for the carrot cupcakes I made last week. They are embarrassingly easy to make. Before you know it you'll have a carrot patch that's the envy of Don Burke (sorry, Aussie joke). Tutorial: Making sugar carrot decorations To make the sugar carrots, you will need: orange fondant (I used Americolor Orange to colour) green fondant (I used Americolor Avocado to colour) a skewer or pointy modelling tool to make a dent in end of carrot small, fine paintbrush water ...

Di-licious

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