Roses, fondant and Sunday afternoons

I went to Cork last week for work and found a rather lovely shop called Brennan's which I LOVED. The entire first floor is cake *stuff* and it's hung with all the icing cutters you could want on the wall. I was in there oohing twice over the same Saturday. The lady let me :)

I decided to purchase a Gerbera cutter set, the biggest Wilton petal nozzle I could find, briar rose cutters, red fondant, and various other little flower cutters as well as the red fondant. So since I was home with no plans this weekend, this is what I got up to . The icing is strawberry flavoured icing from Silverspoon which I bought on a whim.

It's interesting stuff. 125g which you add a spoon of water to and then mix with butter. Pretty effective as it doesn't cause huge icing sugar clouds to form. I might see if I can do that for my normal buttercream. Note that it does say it covers 12 fairy cakes, not cupcakes, and certainly with my decorations it doesn't really stretch. The colour once mixed with butter is a bit more of a muted orangey colour fyi, but if you made it glace I think it would be quite "proper" fairy princess pink. As in too pink for adults.

So I made a few ribbon roses by folding strips of fondant together and rolling, a rose which isn't seen here, various stamp outs and my buttercream roses. It's probably my second time trying to make them, but I have to say, having a giant nozzle, makes ALL the difference. Unfortunately of course, you have to eat the bucket of icing... sorry to say it, I've not brought myself to eat the cakes with icing on yet, but I'm working up to it.

If you are interested, the white iced cupcakes are just marshmallow fluff, and the cupcake recipe themselves were from The Hummingbird bakery book, but ignoring the recipe and going with a cream butter and sugar then add the rest in batches methodology. That recipe FYI makes 12 but makes 12 with a large margin (3/4 of a cm?) from the top of the muffin case. Making icing interesting if you don't like mounds of the stuff. It was another so-so vanilla recipe.

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