Birthday Cupcakes

This week, it's my turn to to tick over another year, and to celebrate, I had a party (because it was a more momentous birthday than usual).

Ever over-ambitious, I decided to make my own cupcakes, and of course, I wanted fancy-ish.  Accordingly, I went on a mission to reproduce the Whimsical Cakehouse bow cupcakes by myself.  I used pre-prepared chocolate fondant for the bows - and by the end of it, I was pretty sick of making them, because they are quite fiddly.  The chocolate fondant was significantly stiffer than the white fondant, making it a bit of a pain to work with. 

The end result of my labours was an awful lot of these: 

 
Oh, and  I made a gluten free, dairy free version of the cakes using this recipe and plain white chocolate in place of ganache for Craig.  That version was a little scary as the cake was crumblier  and generally more fragile, and the white chocolate doesn't take to hot-knifing at all.  In the end, I got something that looked like the other cakes and decided to leave it at that. 

For my party, I went all crafty and covered a cardboard cupcake stand in keeping with the brown colour scheme of my invitations, and made some ball on stick decorations from fondant and gold lustre dust: 

It was a fun night, and the only reviews I have received of the cakes have been good - so I will believe them, despite the cakes being far from perfect.  

Hope you have been having a relaxing weekend.