Wedding Desserts Part 2 – Cupcakes

Wedding Desserts Part 1 was about the cake I made for my friend Joanne’s wedding.  This post is about the cupcakes that I made for her guests.  As the cake was chocolate and vanilla, so were the cupcakes.  Instead of doing the usual swirl frosting, I decided to hand pipe hydrangeas.  Thank goodness her bridesmaids helped me with the piping! I had baked the cupcakes a few weeks in advance, and froze them, so they just needed to be frosted.  We had a piping assembly line:  Charlene unwrapped the cupcakes (and was the motivation cheerleader), Gabbie and I piped the hydrangeas, and Tina piped the centers on the hydrangeas and placed them in the boxes.  It took 3 hours and ended in Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, but we were happy to have contributed to our friend’s special day! We were then off to celebrate Joanne’s final night as a single girl – and what an interesting night that was!

Check out the verdict at the end of the post!

Cupcakes

The vanilla and chocolate cupcakes were made from the same recipe as the cake, posted here.  I ended up making 3 batches of the chocolate and 2 batches of the vanilla to make 150 cupcakes and the cake.

Buttercream frosting

The recipe for the buttercream frosting was the same as the cake, found here.  I doubled the recipe by 6 to cover the cupcakes and the cake.

I coloured a ½ cup of the frosting as a darker yellow, and 1/3 of the rest of the frosting as a yellow-ish green.

Hydrangea frosting

Fill 1/3 of the frosting bag with green frosting, and 2/3 of the bag with white.

Add a tip #104.

See this video for the frosting technique (starting from 6:09). Add yellow dots to the center of each flower using tip #3.

Piping hydrangeas

Piping the centers

Verdict: They turned out beautiful!  Very pretty when all the cupcakes were displayed together.  150 was the perfect amount for 140 guests, with a few left over to send them home with!

Wedding Cake Tasting

My friend Joanne is getting married in the September.  I offered to make her wedding cake, because, hey, she’s a special lady and… I would use any excuse to bake! She took me up on my offer and I have been strategizing the project ever since.  We have decided to do cupcakes for the guests and a small cake for the bride and groom to cut into.  We have already picked the chocolate cake recipe, but have yet to decide on a vanilla cake recipe.

Let the research begin!

I have been checking out vanilla recipes for months and have narrowed it down to 2.  One is a Classic Vanilla Butter cake and the other is a Snow White cake.  They are very different but both veeeery good!

To give Joanne and her fiancé an interesting experience during the tasting, I baked a sample cake with one recipe on the bottom tier and the other recipe on the top tier. 

Which one will they choose?!

Classic Vanilla Butter cake from Sweetapolita

Adaptations:

I quartered the recipe since it was for a tasting.

I whipped the egg whites to stiff peaks first thing, so it was ready to be folded in when I needed it.

Snow White cake from Sweetapolita

Adaptations:

I quartered the recipe since it was for a tasting.



This is what the Classic Vanilla Butter cake looked like right out of the oven.



This is the Snow White cake right out of the oven. 



Classic Vanilla Butter on the left, Snow White cake on the right.

Buttercream icing recipe:

1 cup butter – room temperature

4 cups icing sugar

1 tsp vanilla

2 Tbs milk

Directions:

1.       Soften butter in a large bowl

2.       Add all other ingredients

3.       Mix together with a spoon at first to bring all ingredients together

4.       Whip using a hand held blender until smooth

Buttercream icing

Cake decorating Instruction:

Freeze cakes before icing. This will reduce the amount of crumbs that will get mixed in with your icing, while not affecting the flavor or texture of the cake!

Separate icing and add food colouring. I created a greeny-yellow by combining green and yellow gel food colouring.

Apply buttercream on top of the first layer of the cake, in this case, the Classic Vanilla layer.

Place the second layer of cake on top.  Apply a think crumb coat and smooth out with a stiff spatula dipped in warm water.  The crumb coat will seal in the crumbs.

Put in freezer for a few minutes to set crumb coat.

Fill bag with 2 colours. 

I piped flowers using Tip# 2D.  I used Tip #12 for the bottom border.

Verdict: They chose to go with the Classic Vanilla Butter cake!

I attempted to do lines up the side of the cake using Tip #104.