Let's get frosted!

So whatever happened with all those cupcakes I baked for Sharon's wedding last Thursday?

I got busy wit' 'em on Friday! Even though I didn't eat any cupcakes, nor any of the frosting (honest!), I STILL felt sickeningly sweet, like I'd eaten too much sugary stuff.

I gotta say the light-colored yellow sprinkles Sharon found looked beautiful on the barely-off-white frosting.


Oh, and those stackable cooling racks? I have to thank Aunt Phyllis for turning me on to those a few years back. She had them for something (choc chip cookies I think?) when I was visiting, and I loved how they freed up the counter space. (Believe me, Aunt Phyllis and Uncle Greg's house is huge, and their big beautiful kitchen isn't hurting for counter space - but then again, when you get into these projects, there's NEVER enough counter space!)

I thought the cupcakes would be the most frustrating part of the overall project - afterall, there were 144 of them, and only one 2-layered cake.

Wrong.


I think I spent close to an hour frosting that cake. I started off slow and patient, doing all the right things. After assembling the layers of trimmed cake (to flatten them) with their layer of pudding in the middle, I brushed off all the loose crumbs, and then put on a thin layer of frosting, not worrying about the crumbs that were smearing around in it. After finishing the initial frosting, I let it set for a short bit. Then I went back to it, adding what I thought would be the final, crumbless layer of frosting (after all, all the crumbs were caught in the initial layer).

Wrong.

The crumbs kept mixing into the new frosting, air bubbles were showing up more and more as I tried to fix it, there were layers with thin frosting and cake showing through, while other areas were so thick with frosting it would've killed a diabetic on the spot! What to do!?


I threw it away.

Nah, just kidding.

I scraped off large amounts of the frosting (I DID throw away alot of it), going back to just having a thin, crumb-filled layer on the cake. And then I stuck it in the fridge for over an hour. THAT did the trick! I started over with fresh frosting, adding it to the chilled cake. As the new frosting hit the cold frosting, it added a layer to it that sort of set firmly on the spot without actually mixing in. DEFINITELY a trick to remember for the future! Sure, when it was all finished the frosting was a little thicker than I wanted (admit it - some cakes are a little TOO heavy with frosting), but it didn't look too bad!

While the cake sat in the fridge before getting that cleaner layer of frosting, I worked on the cupcake decorations. Sharon gave me red gummi hearts, red sugar sprinkles, yellow sugar sprinkles, and yellow melting chocolate wafers to top the cupcakes with...



OMG - don't you just love the vibrancy of these sugar crystals!? Something about that color and the crystaline shape made me want to eat it with a spoon!




Let's be honest - by now I was SIIIICK of cupcakes.

Here's a trial run with flowers for the cake. I'd picked up all those geraniums, gerber daisies and begonias. Sharon settled on the begonias, which meant I got to sacrifice the geranium blossoms for for a test run. Good thing I did - I really needed to scale back the florists foam (mom says it was called Oasis when she used to work with the stuff) and the cup holding the foam, plus I would need to ensure the flowers tipped down over the edges of the cup/foam alot to hide it all. The mirror worked great - protected the cake, and created a red background for the flowers on top (rather than white frosting, which would make the flowers look less full). The ribbon around the middle, which Sharon provided, looked really nice. And the spiral on top was inspired by a chocolate/coffee cake we saw, where chocolate-covered coffee beans were in the place of the flowers you see on this cake.

I admit this cake isn't faaaaaancy, but hey, I'm kinda new to this sort of thing, and I would polish it off more on-site.


Oh, did I mention I'm SICK of cupcakes? ;-)