Let Them Eat Cake: Part 3

This week's cake decorating class covered a subject near and dear to my heart: cupcakes! I needed to bring six cupcakes, so of course I made a dozen regular-sized and 40 mini ones. Of course. But I had a plan for the rest - I'll post about that in a minute.

Anyway, I made some delicious chocolate cupcakes and set off for class. I didn't worry about fillings and flavourings - I was saving all of that creative energy for the aforementioned plan. Also, I was busy colouring all of the gross frosting, and kind of grumpy about all the effort it was taking for something I don't really like that much and wouldn't be super excited about sharing with friends.

The class itself was a lot of fun, though. I learned a lot of different piping techniques for creating borders and some very pretty flowers. I'll have to practice to get really good at them, but I was pretty happy with my first tries.

We practiced some things, like this pom-pom flower, on parchment or practice boards before putting them on the cupcakes. This was probably a good thing, 'cause I definitely messed up this flower and had to start over, and I would have been a bit persnickety if I'd had to do that on a cupcake.

Others, like this "shaggy mum", we piped straight onto the cupcakes. It's kind of a weird flower - you'd really have to like frosting a lot to enjoy this. You could use the same tip for grass, or, as I found out from one of the moms who's taking the course, for piping the Cookie Monster on a cake. :)

After we'd done all of the guided piping, we just played around with the techniques. I started by trying to put a few small flowers on this cupcake, but I messed it up so I just covered it up in a whole bunch of icing. It turned out pretty well in the end anyway.

I ended the evening with four finished cupcakes (well, 3 1/2 - I'm not sure the plain white swirl really counts. I really like that one, though)!

Now that I'm an expert frosting piper, I have all the tools I need to build a deliciously gorgeous cake next week. Hold your breath - it's going to be amazing! ;)