Cupcake Challenge - Part 2

Phew…..well it’s taken over a week to recover from creating Sprout’s birthday cake! Looks wise it was a success, but taste wise it was most definitely not!!! But here’s the low down anyway…..

For the cake, I used a recipe from the Blue Door Bakery and of course the trial run went without a hitch. The cake was a little denser than normal, but perfectly acceptable. So last weekend, I was feeling fairly confident and my chief worry was about whether or not I was capable of piping grass!!....

For whatever reason, my second cake attempt seemed to take much longer to cook than the first resulting in a cake with the consistency of a brick!! Luckily, the top came out a bit better and was at least a little edible!!! At this point, I also took the opportunity to trim the excess off the top so that it would sit flat on the base.

For the icing, I used a recipe from the Hummingbird Bakery which I trebled and then substituted half the butter for Trex so that my icing had half a chance of coming out green.

However, before colouring the icing, I dolloped a good splodge of buttercream on the top and sandwiched it to the bottom. I then used the icing to stick chocolate fingers to the base.

Cue the green food colouring. Again the less said about the amount added the better….. A quick practise piping grass….and I was quietly relieved to find it was much easier than I thought it was going to be!! I can definitely recommend using plastic piping bags over fabric!

Once the icing was done, I used a few Dr Oetker paper flowers (take it from me they taste gross so don’t bother eating them if you ever get the chance!) and a number 3 candle to decorate the grassy hill.

The pièce de résistance, which I had absolutely nothing to do with, was a fabulous icing version of Peppa Pig made by one of my lovely friends. Sprout was so excited to see Peppa and loved playing with her!!

One of my other lovely friends has also recommended that I find an oil based cake recipe which might produce a more tasty and less brick like cake!!!!