Pretty Peach Roses

I'm a little bummed. I went to my decorating class this last Tuesday night and made so many different flowers: daffodils, violets, lilies, and roses. The daffodils and lilies I was especially excited about because I just love those flowers. Lilies in particular are my favorite.

The flowers... didn't quite make it through the drive home.

Really, this is okay in the big picture. I wasn't going to use them for anything. I just wanted to share them on the blog and now I can't.

Instead, I have these cupcakes that I was going to post about along with the ill-fated flowers. I  made these a couple of weeks ago (see how behind I am on blogging?) and they were my very first attempt at making roses.

I felt pretty good about them, being my first try and all. The Wilton method has you do them in layers of 3-5-7, but sometimes I forgot to count so I ended up with extra petals on some of these. It just makes for fuller roses!
Roses are so simple to make. They always looks so lovely and, with practice, I think that anyone can do it.

These pictures don't do the blue roses any justice. In real life they were a wonderful and quirky aqua color. I mixed leaf green and sky blue and the result was just beautiful. For the peach I mixed rose pink and lemon yellow. I had never tried either combination before. I was pleased as punch.

The cupcakes themselves were a delicious, moist chocolate. I didn't bake from scratch, I used a box mix. To spice it up a little bit I used the same method I used for this bundt cake; although I didn't have enough Bailey's to make them Irish cream-chocolate. I'm sure that would have been tasty. Instead I used what I had and used replaced the rest of the liquid with water. The Bailey's was just enough to make the cakes super moist.

The frosting was a simple powdered sugar buttercream. I added vanilla bean paste instead of vanilla extract and oh. my. goodness. It makes such a difference.

I have a big cake project coming up in the next few days that I'm excited about and I can't wait to share it!

xoxo
Stephanie

Bringing the May Flowers

Cupcakes!

I had mentioned awhile back in this post that I was going to start taking Wilton cake decorating classes at my local Michael's craft store. It has been great fun so far and I've already signed up for the next class.

These cupcakes were our third lesson and the most intense. There were three different flowers to make (four if you consider star drop flowers and swirls drop flowers vastly different), along with leaves. May I just mention how much I love making leaves? Seriously, I could decorate a cupcake with just leaves. It would look a little funny, I suppose, but it could be great. They're so easy and can really finish a look. If I had another super villain party it could work... Poison Ivy cupcakes. Oh, the leafy possibilities.

Filling the cupcakes was something else we learned during this lesson and that was really easy too. These particular cupcakes were lemon flavored filled with lemon curd. The cupcakes themselves were not spectacular, in my opinion. I tried a new recipe and was not impressed with it. Everyone else who ate them enjoyed the cake; the cupcakes were dense yet moist and tasted like lemon so I shouldn't complain considering that's what they were supposed to taste like. They didn't satisfy me, though, so I won't be sharing that recipe here.