The Butter Cream of my Life.....

I have a great butter cream recipe that looks fantastic on the cupcakes I do which keep their form , which for any cupcaker is paramount to a great cupcake. I have tried the Wiltons recipe and its great, but I dont like having to melt the copha to use in it.... ewww. SO I use the recipe I devised which is
250 grams butter, softened
4 cups of icing sugar
2 teaspoons of vanilla
2 tablespoons of milk
for chocolate butter cream add  3 to 4 tablespoons of chocolate ganache..... mmmm ganache.
To pipe the buttercream i use a big nozzle, lets not get too complicated, i wont go into sizes... just get a big one.... and swirl onto the cupcakes...  :)

Brown Cows 20 year Reunion!

Recently I went to my 20 year reunion , when we were at school we were known as the brown cows, as our lovely uniform was brown .... grrrross. I` didnt do much organising, i was more the friendly yes lady on the other end of the phone for a friend of mine who did a marvellous job putting it all together, and as per usual at the last minute I offered to make cupcakes for our alumni to enjoy, and also i wanted to reassure Kirsty that I was truly trying to help her... passively.
Any way i said, how about some cupcakes with our school colours and some cows heads on top?  Sounded good, but lets not forget that i have 4 kids and one of them is a baby and the other one has ADHD.  I have to say shit gets hectic in my house.... So anyway. I set about making 40 cupcakes, then I baked 40 mini cupcakes just for good measure....overkill is my favourite word! Also I think the closer I got to the day, the more nervous I became. So a baking I went!
I made a vanilla buttercream in what i call HELLO yellow, and then enlisted child labour in the form of my beautiful daughter Hailey to start making cows heads.... I literally dreamt of ways to make cows heads on the tops of these cupcakes.... so the morning of the reunion i was SET!

The cows head were made from brown chocolate fondant, cut into ovals then pink fondant cut into smaller ovals and layed onto the lower half.... a few little holes made for nostrils and a circle cutter indentation for a smile, two little dots in americolour black and VOILA!

the second set of cupcakes were made with chocolate butter cream and sprinkles, nothing too flash as minis are little and the piping itself serves as the embellishment....


they were LUSH and a huge hit Iused alot of icing that day and Lucky for me i had already fallen off the diet wagon! thats all for now,  thanks for reading! to follow, i blog my buttercream recipe, its awesome!