Recently I offered to make a cake for a friend's bridal shower at work. I'm also making this friend's wedding favours, more on this in a few weeks :)
I was given free reign on the cake and told it only needed to feed 12 people. Since it was going to be at work, I knew it's always better to have extra cake, in case more people showed up. From my experience, there no such thing as too much cake at my work place!I've seen a lot of bridal gown cupcake cakes during the hours I've spent on Pinterest, so I thought I'd give it a try. I decided to go with this layout, which used 28 red velvet cupcakes. I actually baked 36 cupcakes, as I tripled the recipe.
My first batch didn't turn out well, as I accidentally mixed the sugar in with the dry ingredients, so I wasn't able to cream the oil and sugar together. This caused the first batch to come out slightly oily and not rise properly, since creaming the oil with the sugar is when all the air is incorporated. The flavour was still good, just the texture was slightly off. This bad batch worked out in my family/friends favour, as it just meant more cupcakes for them :)
I chose to use a cream cheese icing
and iced the cupcakes using simple rosettes. This cake looks really
fancy, but it literally took less than 10 minutes to ice! A few days before the cake was going to be delivered, I made a quick bow out of fondant and left it to dry on a foam pad. By the time it needed to be placed on the cake, it was all dry and firm. The only mistake I made was putting it on the cake and then placing the entire thing into the fridge. As soon as the fondant was in the fridge, it started to sweat and become soft, thankfully it wasn't there for too long and the bow kept most of its shape. Next time, I'll just place the bow on right before delivery.
I placed a purple sash and then the bow on top, and the cake was finished!
It was all well received, which I was happy about, and the bride was completely surprised :) Some even asked for the recipe, which I think is a big compliment, I'm hoping it works out well for them too!