Engagement Desserts

So, I got married on January 1, 2011 and I kindly had one of my friends offer to do my hair for the wedding. A couple months later she was engaged and I thought I would thank her by making some pretty desserts for her engagement party. I found out from one of her bridesmaids that her colours were coral, brown and gold.

For the cake I did vanilla with vanilla icing. Then I covered it in the left over brown fondant from the M&M's cake. Then I made some coral polka dots and a coral ball on top that I dusted in gold pearl dust to make them shimmery. I finished it off with a border of brown and coral balls, also dusted with the gold pearl dust. I haven't gotten very adventurous yet.

(I apologize for the lack of pictures. I was never intending to make a blog. I didn't know I would end up making so many cakes and I don't find my writing interesting to read.)

For the cupcakes I used pretty gold wrappers because I don't have any of that shiny pretty colour on the cake. My Yummy chocolate cupcakes, I actually use this recipe for all my chocolate cake purposes. It was the first on I ever tried and it's been perfect every time. Well, every time I follow the recipe and include all of the ingredients. By this point I almost have the thing memorized.

I'm not very good with icing. Still to this day. Almost every time I try to make icing it fails badly. It's not that it tastes bad, I just can get it stiff enough to hold it's shape. Which on things like cupcakes I find very important. I tried making icing flowers on cupcakes I made one time, but by the time I was finished with them the flowers were sliding off the cupcakes and looking less and less like flowers as they went. So I like to stick with premade icing in a container. I feel so ashamed of the fact sometimes. But, I think success in my decorating is more important overall than the fact that my icing is not homemade. Maybe someday I'll figure it out.

Anyway, I made these chocolate cupcakes and used yummy better crocker chocolate icing. Piping icing like that onto 2 dozen cupcakes take a looooot of icing. I think I went through 3 cans of the stuff. Then I felt they looked boring. So I booked it down to the local Bulk Barn (the party was in an hour) and hoped to find coral sprinkles. Which I didn't. So I mixed pink and orange course sugar. Which in the end I liked a lot, it looked really pretty. I also added some extra sugar around the edge of the cake to tie them together.

Turns out it was a party where most people decided 'hey, I'll whip up a dessert for tonight!' so I ended up bringing home almost the whole cake and at least a dozen cupcakes, which I desperately tried to give out to family and friends because I did not need that much baking in my house. Which is generally the way my baking projects go. Apparently my goal is to make everyone I know fat with my decadent baking. Better than just me getting it all right? At least I am spreading the love.