Have a Good One
So, it’s that holiday where everyone roasts a turkey and counts the ways in which they are grateful for being alive. I offer one and one thing only:
CUPCAKES. Glorious, beautiful cupcakes. A friend ordered a load of them from me for a holiday party, and when I asked her what she wanted and she hesitantly answered “Umm… Red velvet?” I answered: “No.” No one actually wants red velvet. They want cream cheese frosting. In which case, in my opinion, they probably want carrot cake. It’s a strange line of logic, but it’s mine and I’m sticking with it. So she got a little over a dozen carrot cake cupcakes made with chopped sour cherries and pecans and topped with cream cheese frosting. And then I made some chocolate-peppermint ones, too, because I have baking-attention-deficit-disorder (BADD).
I’m a tremendous fan of decorating cupcakes with many different toppings because it’s easy and it adds to the appearance of opulence – two kinds of cupcakes suddenly looks like dozens of kinds. It’s a little deceiving, I know, but people seem to like it. And I like it, frankly. I used to have a dream when I was young about dining at a endless table filled with cartoonishly beautiful baked goods. You can conclude from that whatever you want. One thing that stuck with me was that no one ever actually topped cupcakes with cherries, something I always saw in cartoons but never in real life. Ever since then I’ve always had a least a few topped with cherries. I can’t help it. It looks like magic to me.
I also can’t recommend shopping at Fancy Flours enough. They have an absolutely incredible collection of cupcake liners, jimmies, toppers, things they call cake jewels that are basically every girls’ total fucking fantasy:
(They come in a lot of colors and shapes.) Seriously, right? Can you imagine how awesome, to have an edible jewel on the top of a cupcake? Dang. Also, Fancy Flours sells my alltime favorite cupcake liners, the Tokyo:
These liners are super sturdy and look KLASSY no matter what you do to them. And, you know, $4.50 for 50 of them is a pretty affordable splurge for a special birthday cupcake or what have you.
The flowers I used in the photos above are the mini pansies, though i’ve used the wild rose minis before too. I also think the autumn leaves are fancy without being so girly. But you get the idea: people think this stuff is alien technology. For reals. Like, the first time I put sugar flowers I didn’t even make on top of a cupcake and they freaked the fuck out, I spent a lot of energy explaining that it was just a stupid flower from a package. I didn’t even make it. And you know what? They didn’t care at all. As far as they were concerned I had pulled a diamond out of my bellybutton. And that’s when I realized: the things that I value, as a baker? No one else values but other bakers. The rest of the rabble will scream and rend their clothes over store-bought sugar flowers. Take note.
November 26th, 2009 | Food Rant
gah! that chocolate and cherry cupcake photo is beautiful.
also, are those orange and yellow bits chocolate covered candied sunflower seeds?
happy turkey flavored beer day!
And that’s when I realized: the things that I value, as a baker? No one else values but other bakers. The rest of the rabble will scream and rend their clothes over store-bought sugar flowers. Take note.
Knitting is turning out to be exactly the same! I am now at the point where I look at Fair Isle and I go “Damn, that’s just working 2 colors per row following a chart, don’t pull that shit too tight and it ain’t no thang”, but I know if I whip up a pair of Fair Isle mittens everyone’s going to crap their shorts over it…whereas I’m looking at the finishing work all the time: Are my seams tidy? Is the tension even over the whole work? How does my heel turn look?
Can we discuss the decorator tip you use there? I like how crisp the edges of the swirls look. And then you just roll the edge gently in a pile of sprinkles? I have a 1st birthday party coming up for my bebe and I’m going to do cupcakes. She’s getting something fruit sweetened, poor little sod.
Also, 1)Maraschino cherries scare the shit out of me, but are horribly delicious, and 2)I love, love, love the cupcake liners and the UNBELIEVABLE candy jewels. I’m all over that for Sylvia’s next b-day.
I so hear you on the knitting, too – I just made my first pair of socks (Monkey, of course, thanks to you) and until I actually made them, I thought it was going to be this tremendous effort, which of course it wasn’t at all. But try telling anyone else that, I mean, you just performed spontaneous generation. Humans don’t actually make socks.
The decorator tip is the Wilton 1M, which is what they call an “open star tip” – you can also bend the tip in a little to make even more severe ribbons. The other thing is that they teach you to pipe from the outside in which uses up way too much frosting. However, if you pipe from the inside out as I have done above, you use 1/2 as much frosting and it comes out looking almost like a rose. In fact, there are people who do a more angular circling and it looks surprisingly like a rose. Does that make sense? Like, don’t ‘circle’ out from the center, but kind of go… pentagonally out.
I don’t roll the edge of the frosting is sprinkles, I actually drop the sprinkles onto the wet frosting. So I hold the cupcake at an angle over a plate to catch the falling sprinkles and then carefully apply to just the edges. This keeps the frosting nice and intact. The key is to only frost a few cupcakes, stop, and then decorate. Otherwise but the time you get done frosting the entire batch, the frosting will have dried just enough to make the sprinkles resist sticking.
Man, those candy jewels. I didn’t warn in the main post, but those aren’t cheap. Those are sort of frustratingly expensive and makes me feel like I can do them myself. In fact, it IS fairly easy to find jewel-shaped candy molds, and I wonder how hard it would be to cast some clear sugar into them…
Oh! And regarding the maraschino cherries – totally toxic and weird and I hate having them in the house because I WILL EAT THE ENTIRE JAR. A good alternative would be either a marzipan ball rolled in red coloring (but, since you’re not using colorings, that won’t work) or a natural red gumdrop. I mean, you’re smarter than me, you know what to do. Even a red Sunspire candy. Just a red thing. Only in cartoons, I tell you!
“I want to go to there”
What’s with the red velvet hate? I realize that I’m leaving a 1:30 am comment on a rather old blog post but seriously- a red velvet cake done right is delicious. Tangy buttermilk cake, not too sweet, not too chocolatey, and not entirely full of red dye (the acid and cocoa turn reddish, and back in the day the use of beet sugar helped, too).
What can I say? I don’t like 99% of the red velvet cake out there. In fact, the very best red velvet I’ve eaten was just okay. I want to like it — your description of a not-too-sweet, very lightly chocolately buttermilk cake sounds delicious. But what I always end up with is a mouthful of red dye #40 (which is bitter to me) and enough sugar to crystallize my eyeballs. But people just lose their minds over it! Twice I’ve had this conversation where I ask someone with genuine curiosity: what about it do you like? And they’ve both answered “Well, I really love cream cheese frosting…” I suppose I feel like there’s a lot of other underloved cake flavors out there, too. Like German chocolate! No one gushes over German chocolate anymore, and I adore it.
Those cupcakes are so goddamned adorable that they make me giddy. Your childhood fantasy of cartoonishly beautiful treats resonates deeply with me, and I think you’ve put your finger on the secret to recreating it: the variety of decorations on the cupcakes really does make it feel more lavish.
I’ll put this good advice to use pronto.
Thank you! I definitely believe it’s all about visual variety. I’ve had several occasions where I’ve done cupcakes for a crowd and it doesn’t matter how many actual flavors of cupcakes there are as long as there’s like 10 different looking varieties. Every single time, everyone’s amazed. I feel like a magician.