The Making: Giant Cupcake in buttercream

Giant cupcake! Yup that's what I'm gonna show you today. Honestly I don't do much buttercream cakes because I mostly get requested to make fondant covered cakes, so on the rarity that I do get an order like this, I get kinda nervous. First of all, buttercream well..it's tricky..You've got to get the right consistency to produce the effect that you want. Second of all, you've got to get the right flavour according to your clients needs. There are many types of buttercream. There's American buttercream, Swiss meringue buttercream, Italian buttercream etc...hmm how come there's no Malaysian buttercream? Perhaps I should invent one. :) Anyway different buttercreams offer different levels of sweetness and texture. Most Malaysians don't like their cakes too sweet but in our humid and hot weather, they also would like if their cakes don't melt as easily.

Now like I said this is tricky. In order for buttercream to hold up a design, it needs quite a lot of powdered sugar in it and American buttercream seems to be the best choice in this case. That being said, the frosting then can end up being quite sweet. So when a customer says to me, "I don't want the frosting to be too sweet", I really have to scratch my head. (not this customer la but most of them). The only thing I can end up saying is that I can only adjust the sweetness in the cake itself. The only way I can cut down the sweetness in the frosting is by adding a bit of salt. Otherwise it is impossible to pipe. Otherwise I would suggest Swiss meringue buttercream, which is pipable but will not hold up well in hot weather. Well, you win some, you lose some.:) Aaaanyway let's start then..

Okay so giant cupcake. I really didn't have a mold for this so I went and bought this beauty. It's made of sillicone so it was pretty easy to get the cake out.

I then made some American buttercream which is basically made of powdered sugar and butter of course. I just added a little shortening to make sure that it was more stable and pipable in order to hold the shape of the rosettes. Of course a little salt to cut down the sweetness. Then I slathered the buttercream on the cake to form a crumbcoat and another layer to make it pretty. Here's the thing, and another reason why buttercream irks me a bit...being the perfectionist that I am, I will take AGES just doing this initial step. I see a dent and I get all flustered and want to smooth it over and over again. In other words, I find buttercream cakes are much harder than fondant at times..(okay MOST of the time).

Anyway, once I finally got that done. I practiced my rosettes. I mixed one part of the buttercream with some peach gel coloring.Then I put half of each the colored and non colored into a piping bag complete with 1M tip. Pressed and swirled it from the middle to outwards until I got the size that I wanted.

Once I was satisfied with the rosette that came out, I was ready to attack the giant cupcake wooooooOoo!

So I forgot to take step by step pics on how I arranged the rosettes on the giant cupcake.But here you can see the little star buttercream borders that I piped.

And here you can see how I piped the rosettes on the cupcakes itself. I made 3 colours, peach, maroon and natural buttercream

Here is a view of the cake from above.

...and from the side.

I made the cut out messages and put it on a fondant cut out decorated with pink polka dots.

..laid them on the cupcakes..

Then I made these twizzlers ( yeah I made that word up) a string of pink and a string of peach..

..then you 'twizzle' them together..

Here are my polkadot fondant butterflies drying into shape

More views of the cake..

Then I brushed some pearl lustre on to the alphabets..

...and also on the butterflies..

  By the way, I made the board myself. I got some matching wrapping paper and covered the board with it and covered it again with a sticky plastic sheet. It really made the cake come all together. Giant buttercream cupcake was a success! Toodeloo folks!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN EVERYBODY!

Happy Halloween to all those celebrating love from Home May'de Cakes. This year I went as Cave Woman.

Here is a snapshot of my daughter in the costume that I made for her..my cutie pie is little young lady now.:)

I hope all of you had fun this Halloween!

The Making : Hi-5 themed cake

1..2..3..4..HI-5!! Omg..you don't know how many thousands of times I've heard this song in this short span of being mommy..my two year old loves this Australian band and because of that I decided to make it the theme for her second birthday this year :) 

For those who don't know, this is the cartoon version of the Hi-5 band so I based the figurines on them.

These are the girl figurines sans face and clothing

and these are the guys..my favourite is Tim by the way..yeah I'm referring to the second batch of Hi-5ers..They have new members now apparently.. how do I know this? I can't help it, my daughter DEMANDS for the DVDs to be shown everyday and I must admit that I'm a fan too..bahaha..silly stalker mom..

Next up, the clothing and the details that goes with it. This is Fely.

Then the hair..

More details..this is Lauren by the way..I did the rest of the figurines the same way and basically referred to the cartoon pics all the time.

I also wanted to make Jup Jup the annoying creature that stalks Fely in the show. I made his legs using rice crispy treats.

Oooh but we must talk about the cake. These are the new premium flavours that I will introduce soon. This is coconut cake with blueberry and cream cheese filling.

This.. my lovelies is an oreo layer cake which has crushed oreos in two layers of chocolate cake sandwiching a vanilla cake (also with crushed oreos) with cream cheese filling between the layers with..yeah you guessed it..CRUSHED OREOS!!

Then I slather on that wondrous chocolate ganache..mmmehhmmm

Anywhoo..this is Jup Jup all covered with purple fondant. He's made up of butter walnut cake :)

I gave him a face here

Then I stuck on some rice crispy treats on some toothpicks and covered them with green and purple fondant.

I just poked them into Jup Jup's head like so..

There, a full head of ..urmm..hair..

Then I prepared the legs the same way too.

Next up is another favorite character on the show called Ms. Chatterbox or Chatz. Here you see her neck which is covered in yellow fondant and is appropriately made up of a delightfully fresh lemon cake with lemon curd filling.

Here you see the crushed oreo cake as Chatz's box and I put my 6" pan there to estimate the placement of Chatz's neck. I don't describe here much details on how I did Chatz's facial features but I think it's pretty straightforward as seen here.

Next  is the round cake with colourful hands all over the cake. I found these cute hand shaped cutters at my bakery supply shop and I had to get them for this cake!

Then I made the Hi-5 logo

Not my finest work,,but it was a personal cake so..what the heck!

Here I made a Happy Birthday message using gum paste and sticking some silver glitter on the individual alphabets.

This is where I placed the figurines. here you can see Tim, Lauren and Casey.

..and here Stevie and Fely!

Here's the pic of the combined cakes at my daughter's party. All and all there were 5 flavours so it was really a challenge in the sense that I had to bake so many flavours at once! There was coconut cake with blueberry cream cheese filling, lemon cake with lemon curd filling, butter walnut cake with mocha buttercream, funfetti cake (vanilla cake with colourful sprinkles baked into it) with raspberry buttercream and last but not least the crushed oreo cake with crushed oreo cream cheese filling!...faint...

One last look at the Hi-5ers..

Jup-Jup...

and Chatz!!

Got some cute stickers to stick on the board and there you have it mate! A Hi-5 themed birthday cake for my 2 year old daughter Aurora Minuya..anything for my cutie pie :)