Icing and Iron Man

Hi guys! So I ended up not baking cupcakes on Thursday (hence no pictures) but next time I'm baking I will upload some. Yesterday I went and saw The Avengers, which was absolutely AMAZING, and ended up not getting home until 2 AM and, therefore, didn't get up until 2 PM today. It's been a pretty lazy day, so nothing really to report, but I though I would share with you guys some pictures that I took a couple weeks ago of some rose cupcakes that I had made for a friend's birthday. The photo quality is not great and I was using store bought icing so it was not very stiff, which made the roses flatten out a little, but they still resemble roses (I hope). Side note: These are not roses like you would make on an icing nail. These are done on the cupcake and are a quick alternative to actual iced roses.

In case you were wondering how to do this:

I used tip 1M. Starting in the middle, with the icing tip perpendicular to the cupcake, you squeeze the bag and move in a counter-clockwise motion, slowly moving out to the edge of the cupcake. After you've gone around the cupcake two or three times, and you are running out of space on the cupcake, you want to let up on the pressure and drag off the icing until you have no more icing coming out of the bag and the rose is ended in a little natural looking tail (I try to kind of wrap the tail underneath the previous circle of icing so you don't have this awkward thing hanging off your cupcake). Next time I'm baking I'll do a video of this so it's clearer, I know that written instructions on this sort of thing can be hard to follow. As I said before, I used store bought icing. While this is a great time and effort saver, the icing is not as thick as homemade icing and therefore does not hold designs as well. I added some powdered sugar to the icing and then refrigerated it for a good twenty minutes before using it and that helped thicken it some. It didn't change the taste much but it did make it fluffier (almost like whip cream). I couldn't decide if I liked it better with the added powdered sugar or not, but I definitely don't think it tasted bad. Hopefully tomorrow I'll have time to bake and can post a video!

French word of the day: Petit gâteau which is French for cupcake (or literally, little cake).

Au Revoir!

"Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first." -Mark Twain.