Sunday, 19 February 2012

Valentine's Cupcakes!

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Since I was already making the red velvet cake I decided to make some cupcakes for a couple of my friends as well. I don't normally make cupcakes because I don't like to decorate them as much as there is not as much space to put details onto it.

I am slowly getting converted to cupcakes however as I had a lot of fun with these ones:

Before they went into the oven. Look at the vibrancy of the colour! I used my wilton red food colouring gels which I think is why it was so vibrant and bright!

After the oven:

Looking quite brown but actually once you cut into them the red colour really shown through! The cupcake cases I actually got from Hobbycraft in the Christmas sale, I don't have a proper picture of them but they have cute hearts on them, how fitting for Valentine's day!

After they were decorated!

I used the cream cheese icing as well just with pink colouring. The chocolate hearts were made just by melting some chocolate and piping them into heart shapes. I melted them onto my parchment paper just to stop them sticking. After a wee while (I didn't bother to time it!) they harden up and you can just stick them into the frosting!
After that I just sprinkled on some hundreds and thousands because I love colourful things!

I was quite happy with the way these turned out since usually Ii struggle to pipe the icing in a spiraling way but they were well received!

Labels: cupcakes, Red Velvet, Valentine's | 2 comments

Friday, 17 February 2012

Valentine's Cake

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I tried my hand at making a Red Velvet flavoured cake for Valentine's this year and I have to admit I loved it! As well as making a cake for Chris I also made cupcakes- they will be shown in the next post though.

The recipe that I used I had no problems with although I did substitute the white wine vinegar for white rice vinegar, to me it taste bad but next time buy the right vinegar and compare the tastes!

The inspiration that I used for this cake was from a cake lady on cakecentral and here's a link to her cake, I am not sure if this is the original but its where I found the idea!
http://cakecentral.com/gallery/1315625/valentine-cake-a-little-bit-special
It's quite appropriate for Chris as he has to put up with my cake addiction!

Here is my version of it:

I quite liked the contrast of the black and the baby pink colour. For the black 'background' I didn't use fondant but instead a cream cheese frosting. They both worked well with the cake and the frosting hardened up nicely! For the hearts I used a cookie cutter but for the letters I carved them out myself. It definitely would have taken half the time if I had an alphabet cutter so I am putting that on my wish list!

 I couldn't figure out how to the the twisting technique for the fondant border to get it even all the way around the border however.
Chris approved of the cake however so I was happy with the result! =D

Labels: cake, Red Velvet, Valentine's | 0 comments