I went off to London a couple of weeks ago, the plan was to attend an experience day with Eric Lanlard - learning to decorate cupcakes with the aware winning master patissier, which was a present from my brother. However, too good to be true, just as I was leaving for a three-day conference, (the plan was to travel down to London straight from the conference), I got an email to say the day I'd booked for had been cancelled due to low numbers. Arghh! Hopefully I will be able to rebook it again soon, as I've been looking forward to it for 6 months, and crikey I need help with my cake decorating!
Anyway, before I headed off to London, I thought I would be a swotty student, and attempted to make some cupcakes and try out my decorating skills - so that I could ask questions based on experience and hopefully learn something!
So, the experiment....I made up half a batch or raspberry cupcakes, and half a batch of blueberry cupcakes. I then mixed up some butter and mascapone, then split the mix in half again to have half blueberry and half raspberry.
The mascapone and butter mix - taken directly from a cupcake magazine recipe - seemed quite sloppy, so I stuck it in the fridge for a bit, then once firmed, I mixed in the fruit. However, as you can see from the pictures below, the topping seemed to curdle a bit - it still tasted very yummy (I really really ate far too much) but runng and slightly wishy washing looking. Not sure where I went wrong - hence the idea of being able to quiz Eric. Ahh well, I shall save my questions up.
Trying to be clever (this bit worked well) I split the mixture, but placed both in the piping bag, to produce a marble swirly effect. Yay, I got something right....once I'd finished icing all the cupcakes, I then finished off the last of the topping straight from the icing bag. This is where I accidentally ate too much of it, seems to bag holds a lot more than I realised. I was feeling a tad sick! oops!
The cupcakes - managed to spill the mix onto the paper cases, so looking a bit messy - need to up my game a bit there...
Close up of the buttercream type topping - you can see the wrinkly effect in the piping, is this curdling? I'm not sure, but it wasn't the effect I was after.
And here's my trying out my other love - photography. Oh well, I think I'm better at food photography than cake decorating today!
Ooh and finally, here's my friend at work enjoying one of the cupcakes! Or at least she said she was enjoying it!
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