Show-and-Tell Saturday!! Roses Are Red...

Roses are red,

Violets are blue (or violet if we are being picky here)

Cupcakes are yummy

Get into my tummy!!!!

 (I'm obviously NOT a poet, and now you all know it....)

 

Today we have an AWESOME post by Meghan. I wasn't able to get my head together after the big family reunion last week to craft (finish OR start anything), so I have a fun post submitted by a reader this week instead.

 

She figured out all the issues of her pin, laid it all out for us, and came out with a delightful result!
Seriously Meghan these look fantastic!! You did a great job!!

Check out today's Show-and-Tell Saturday!!

 

 

Show-and-Tell Saturday

 

The Inspiration Pin

 

http://cakecentral.com/t/672414/cupcake-bouquet-disaster

 

 This cupcake rose bouquet is adorable, and delicious! These would be great for gifts, or cute at parties and also they are a functional way to display your amazing frosting artistic talents!

 

Here is Meghan's version!

 

Show-and-Tell

Pin Win

 

So I just love everything about this! The colors, the pot, the icing art, all of it! This is just awesome Meghan!

 

Here is what she had to say about it:

"This is a project that started to go south several times during the middle, and ultimately did not end up as I envisioned it, but was still mostly a success.

I made this for my boyfriend, as he often gets me roses as a "just because" gift, and I am never sure what the guy gift equivalent of flowers is. I do love baking, though, and this seemed like a cute way to show him my appreciation. 

Issue #1: while I am quite good at baking tasty desserts, I have little to no skill at decorating. My previous attempts at decorating with icing have tended to look like they were done by a five-year-old who was "helping" Mommy decorate. Nonetheless, I looked up a few tutorials on making icing roses and felt sure that with the right tools, I could succeed in making a rose. I rushed out and bought a basic decorating kit that included a petal tip and a flower nail, and got to work.

Issue #2: I had gotten a cute little red and white flowerpot at WalMart to make my bouquet in, and I wanted my roses to match it, so I set out to make a deep red icing. I had icing gel food color in "Red Red," so I assumed that it would not be too difficult to achieve truly red icing. An ungodly amount of food coloring later, my icing was still distinctly pink, and I decided to give up. Oh well, my boyfriend is pretty secure in his masculinity and would not flinch at pink cupcakes.

Issue #3: The icing rose tutorials I'd read recommended royal icing or a "good, stiff buttercream." Royal icing tastes horrible, and I hate the sickly sweetness of the standard powdered sugar-based buttercreams, so I chose a Swiss buttercream that has gone over well in the past. It's light and airy and not overly sweet at all. It also proved far too soft to make roses with. The "cone" of icing you build the rose around would just wobble and fall over as I attempted to put petals around it. I popped the icing in the freezer for a few minutes to firm it up, and ended up with icing that was too stiff to squeeze out of the piping bag easily, and that started to bleed red food coloring in an unsettling way as it warmed up.

Issue #4: I committed a familiar Pinstrosity mistake and just skimmed the pictures in the original pin and thought I had the gist of it. Portion cups, flowerpot, hot glue, icing roses: got it. I failed to notice that the pictures that showed perfect little icing roses on the bouquets were made with MINI cupcakes. To make icing roses large enough to cover a standard cupcake, I would have needed to buy a much larger petal tip. I now had squares of waxed paper that were covered in deformed, strangely disproportionate roses that continued to bleed red food coloring. Disgusted, I failed to take a picture, scraped all my icing into a container, and threw it in the fridge to regroup and start again the next day.

The next day, I gave my icing a thorough beating in the Kitchenaid, and the food color that had bled out reincorporated really nicely and actually made it look a little redder. I put a really large star tip on my piping bag and, starting at the middle of each cupcake, piped the icing on in a big swirl. The softness of the icing actually worked well here, and my cupcakes ended up looking pretty roselike. The one in the front of this picture was the best one; I tried to hide the really uneven ones at the back of the bouquet. I'd intentionally underfilled my cupcake liners a little, so the cupcakes nestled perfectly into the portion cups. I had some silk flowers lying around, so I stripped them of their leaves and used them to cover up some of the mess I'd made hot gluing the portion cups into the flowerpot. After this picture, I disassembled the whole thing and put the cupcakes, along with some extras in case of disasters in transport, into my cupcake carrier and reassembled it at my boyfriend's house. He did immediately drop some of the soft, red icing onto his shirt, and given the amount of food color I used, I doubt the stain will come out. But other than that, it was a pretty big success.

I plan to reuse this idea in the future, when I need small gifts for friends, and I assume it will go more smoothly now that I know what I'm doing."

 

So readers, there you have it, todays Show-and-Tell, I love that she went through and broke it down, found where she perhaps had gone wrong and fixed the problem. She even went back through and reread the directions, and her project turned out amazing! Thanks Meghan!
Some day I will get brave and dive into icing flowers, but for now I should probably focus on breakfast!

Happy Saturday all!