Baby Shower Cupcakes for Wendy - Vanilla Magnolia Bakery Cupcakes with Fondant Shoes

Recently, a lovely lady called Wendy in our finance team left on maternity leave.  It is her first baby, and her Mum is coming from Korea to be with her during the birthing process.  It is a very exciting time for her.

A morning tea was held at work in Wendy's honour.  I like to bake for such occasions (surprising, eh?) and decided to make some cupcakes for Wendy.  I initially thought I should go for fancy flavours, but in the end, decided to make vanilla cupcakes with vanilla icing. The classic always go down well.  Wendy is having a little girl, which made the choice of icing colour for my cupcakes a doddle - pretty pink!

I made these cupcakes over there nights.  On a Tuesday evening, I made the little fondant shoe cake toppers while incongruously watching Seinfeld on the TV:

The mould that I used is this one, in case you are interested in getting one yourself.  I stretched my shoes a little when they came out of the mould, which is  why mine look a little different to the ones in the mould photo.  But hey, I am not going to freeze the mould for a few minutes in between making each shoe, especially when I am making 24 of them at night after work.

To mix things up a bit, I used Magnolia Bakery's vanilla cupcake recipe for the cupcakes:

I bought the Magnolia Bakery cookbook from the Magnolia Bakery in NYC last year, so it has special significance for me.  However, the recipe is also online here. 

I used my favourite icing recipe - the Primrose Bakery vanilla icing recipe - and coloured it pale pink.  It just seemed less over the top than the Magnolia Bakery recipe, which uses tons of icing sugar and butter.  I piped the icing on the cupcakes in a rose pattern (which uses way less icing than the "icecream" swirl), then placed a little shoe on top of each cake, with a few strategically placed pastel coloured cachous: 

I think they were very pretty, and Wendy seemed to be delighted with them.  I also got some rave reviews from my colleagues, so these were a winner all round.

Baby shoe lemon cupcakes

  

Michelle is going on maternity leave, so to bid her adieu for now, I made her some lemon cupcakes with fondant baby shoes on top.

The lemon cupcake recipe and lemon buttercream is from The Primrose Bakery, and can  be found online here.  There appears to be a mistake in the buttercream recipe, as it refers to milk in the method but not in the ingredients.  Working from their vanilla buttercream recipe, I estimated that it needed 30ml of milk, which together with 30ml of lemon juice, makes 60ml of fluid, as per the vanilla buttercream.  This seemed to work just fine.

I think the cupcakes turned out really cute:

The piping is not as neat as it could have been, because I suspect I used my pastry tip instead of my icing tip, but that's OK.

I had a sneaky taste of both cake and buttercream, and they are both pleasantly lemony and delicious.

The shoes are made from fondant that I hand-coloured in with red (pink) and blue colouring, and using this mould (I got mine from Cake Deco in Port Phillip Arcade).  I didn't bother messing around with the bows or flowers as I have no idea if Michelle is having a boy or a girl.

This is a super easy idea for a baby shower, and the cakes are tasty too.

Pram Cake for Sandra

Sandra recently had her last day at work before the birth of her first bub.  To send her off in style, I made her a pram cake.  It is loosely based on an idea which I found here.

I scaled the cake down for a 6" tin, using marshmallows for wheels and mini M & Ms for the decoration. The pram handle is a strip of cola flavoured sour candy. The cake was just a plain butter cake from the Australian Women's Weekly, and the buttercream was a quarter recipe from the Crabapple Bakery Cookbook.

 I think this cake is so cute, and I chose it because the idea is simple but very effective. And when you are time poor like me at this time of year, that is exactly what you need!

Donna Hay's Beehive Cupcakes

Today we held an afternoon tea at work in honour of Janet, who finishes up this week to have a baby.  Linda made a beautiful nappy cake for Janet as a gift from all of Janet's colleagues, and there was terrific catering from Junto Cafe.  And of course, I baked.  My contribution to our feast was Donna Hay's Beehive Cupcakes, with honey buttercream icing instead of meringue icing because I did not want to feed uncooked eggs to a pregnant lady.

My beehives look a little flat, primarily because it was a warm night and there was no time for me to set my buttercream before piping it onto the cakes.  I don't think anyone, least of all me, cared about that.  

The resulting honey flavoured cupcakes with honey icing were devine.  There was not so much honey as to make the cakes sickeningly sweet - the honey just added a pleasant sweetness and no more.

You can find the recipe for the cakes here on Donna Hay's website.  And you can find the recipe for the honey buttercream here.

Lavendar and Orange Baby Shower Cookies for Caroline

Today we are taking Caroline to lunch as a kind of work baby shower.  Her baby is not due until July, and she will be with us for a few more weeks (if all goes to plan), but we decided to hold her shower now because of the uncertainty of when babies choose to arrive, and because I am imminently going on leave.

To celebrate, I also made some baby shower biscuits.  I have previously made the biscuit  recipe here.  Although these biscuits taste nice, I had the same debacle as I did last time with the dough being very soft, making it hard to work with.  In the future, I will stick to the tried and true Daring Bakers sugar cookies for cut-out cookies. I am pretty sure I could put the same orange and lavendar flavours through the sugar cookies, but have a dough that is not so challenging to work with.

The only changes that made to the biscuit recipe were that I rubbed the orange zest into the sugar to up the orange flavour, and I used the whole egg instead of just the egg yolk. I don't recommend the latter change,  as I had to up the flour significantly to get a dough I could work with at all. (Although even when I made these the way the recipe stated last time, I still had trouble with the softness of the dough, so adding the whole egg was not the sole problem.) 

Instead of the lemon icing from last time, I just used all royal icing, as I found the lemon icing to be very soft.  I was not thrilled with the consistency of this recipe for royal icing - I know that I can make flood icing cookies well, but this icing was too thick to flood well, but too thin to outline well.  Accordingly, the finished product is a little rough, but as it was after 10pm at night when I was icing them, I just kept going.

Hope Caroline likes them, despite their flaws.  

Claire's baby cake

Claire, our wonderful and efficient payroll officer, left us on maternity leave yesterday. She is going to have a little girl, so I decided I was going to make her a girly-pink baby-themed cake for her last day.

The pink base cake was made from the cupcake recipe used by Lorraine of Not Quite Nigella in her breath-takingly beautiful Ispahan cupcakes. The cake formed a macaron-style crust on top as it baked, which I loved.

My inspiration for the cake design came from Cuppycake Digital Designs, who makes the sweetest little baby cupcakes ever (blog now removed). However, not having the patience to make 24 of the little sods, I converted the design to a single large cake.

As no-one wants to eat a massive ball of rolled fondant, which I would have needed to make for a pure fondant head and body big enough for this cake, I instead used part of the cake batter to make two patty-cake sized small cakes that I iced together for the head, and a half-size mini loaf cake for the baby's body. I iced the cake and the body parts with water icing, and stuck the head and body in place while the icing on the cake was still wet.




I created the blanket, dummy and bow from rolled fondant, with the blanket binding picked out with a fork and the blanket design embossed using a small butterfly cookie cutter, and stuck those on the cake while the water icing was almost but not quite dry. The baby's eyes and nose were painted on using black liquid food colouring on the tip of a skewer.

I was also a little crafty for Claire, and created this cross-stitch photo-album wrapper from a pattern in Issue 198 of CrossStitcher:

I bought the materials before I knew whether Claire was having a boy or a girl, hence I played it safe and made it green. I even hauled out the sewing machine from hibernation to sew on the ribbon!

I wish Claire and her family every happiness for the pending birth of Claire's second child.

Baby Booties Cake

Sue's Baby Cake
Originally uploaded by Cakelaw

The cake pictured was made for Sue, who also leaves us on Friday on maternity leave. The base is a simple butter cake from The Margaret Fulton Cookbook, but I made three muffin-sized cupcakes and one big cake from the mixture instead of two layer cakes.

To make the booties, I creatively sliced and arranged the cupcakes, then iced the whole lot in buttercream, and followed up with glace icing for piping the outline of the booties and the shoelaces. I topped it all off with Sue's name piped in chocolate.

This is a simple but effective cake - although it does have its technical difficulties in icing it (but would be a breeze for masters at cake decorating such as Su Yin or Cupcaketastic).