Mothers Day Cupcake Bouquet

MAY 2013

I've seen cute rose bouquets made from cupcakes and thought I'd give it a go. Mothers Day seemed the perfect opportunity. There seemed to be a few different ways to do it, but I didn't have much time so I did take some shortcuts.

 I started with chocolate cupcakes in green swirl patty pans. I ran out of brown patty pans which would have been better to disguise as 'dirt', but oh well. Some of the others I've seen have chocolate ganache smeared over the Styrofoam ball but I didn't bother.

First technique - adding filling
I wanted to try adding a filling to the cupcakes so I used an apple corer to create the holes (saw this done on Cupcake Wars a fair bit) and poured some ganache into the hole. Wouldn't use ganache again as it set fairly hard and didn't have an oozy effect. Am doing some more tonight actually and trying a rich chocolate frosting.

Second technique - multi coloured icing 
I was going to be piping roses so I wanted to have a natural looking effect where it wasn't a solid colour. I used pink and peach and it turned out ok but not as much definition as I would have liked.

 Third technique - piping a rose 
I bought a Wilton 1M tip and read up a bit on how it should be done. I was really happy with the results

Final hurdle - assembly 
Well, this was much harder than I thought. I had a small pot and pushed a styrofoam ball into it. I first tried with half of a bigger ball and glued it, but I couldn't get it to work. A smaller ball that could fit in snuggly did the trick.

 I started with bamboo skewers to attach the cakes but ended up finding toothpicks better. I poked the bottom of the cupcake first to get through the patty pan and then pushed the cakes onto toothpicks embedded into the ball. I worked around ball being very careful to keep the balance.

 In the end I had to settle for a smaller bouquet as I couldn't get a full circle bouquet - they kept falling off. Might try icing the cakes after they are attached next time...just a thought. Would also take the time to make fondant leaves instead of using tissue paper.

 Here's the results: