Tess' cupcakes**
Monday, October 6, 2008 at 3:39PM Big excitement - our kitchen renovation is happening soon, soon, soon - October 14 to be exact! This is the last job I'm taking until it's done, which should be right around Thanksgiving (fingers crossed, god willing, etc., etc.)
Tess' mother Brett first hired me last year to make Elmo cupcakes for Tess' 2nd birthday. (As an aside, this photo, taken with crappy light with my crappy camera, is far and beyond the most popular of all of our photos on Flickr, with 2200+ views to date. If you are a Flickr user and haven't checked out the stats section, you should - it's pretty cool.)
For her 3rd birthday, Tess wanted princess cupcakes - something similar to the cupcakes I made with leftover colored chocolate pieces from Lindsay's cake, but with crowns instead of doodads. The best thing about working with Brett is that she's not completely set on a design and gives me some freedom to make what I think would work best, so I decided to make teeny crowns out of gumpaste instead.
I tried a couple of different ways to make the crowns, using cutters, etc., but in the end came up with cutting long strips of gumpaste, notching the tops, and cutting those into little pieces. They dried overnight and I topped each crown with a dot of royal icing (normally I'd just use buttercream but I really wanted the dots to dry in place and royal's the best thing for that).
60 cupcakes in all, 1/2 chocolate, 1/2 vanilla bean, with an extra large one for the birthday girl. I just had enough batter to make 30 of each flavor and thought 1/2 a batch of my buttercream would be enough, but of course it wasn't - I was short at least 10 cupcakes. At 11pm the night before I made another 1/4 batch and finished them off. Good thing I usually have pounds and pounds of butter and powdered sugar as backup!
Big one in the middle for the birthday girl
Thinking they look a tad more like a jester hat than a princess crown, but that's ok with me!
action shot - how the crowns were made (because I know everyone was wondering:)
crowns ready to be topped with royal icing
**BTW - I actually looked this up - when using an apostrophe to indicate possession after a proper noun, either ' or 's is acceptable, but I think less is more:)
Reader Comments (1)
Hi Sara.. My name is Tina from Sacramento Ca. I came aross your website looking for Lady bug Cupcakes for a friends bday. Anyways. I was looking and I am wondering ... on your Crown cupcakes.... what was the frosting you used? And What kind of cupcake tins are you using? Thanks! Oh I dont know if you have a myspace or Facebook... but here is my address.
TinaFox418@yahoo.com