YES, okay?

This weekend I baked up a storm (more to follow later) for an open house. And for all you people who gave me a hard time last time for not checking the oven, YES, I checked it this time, okay? Even though I knew there was nothing in there, I checked it anyway. I've learned my lesson.

Hard Lessons

I had a big order this last week. A lady in my building who has taken me under her wing asked me to make specialty cupcakes for her children's last day of school. She wanted enough cupcakes for the class, but asked that I make each one represent a separate lesson or theme from the school year. Her list was long and included some rather odd things--the Vikings, maps/globes, insects vs. arachnids, Native Americans, plants and seeds and how they grow, cursive handwriting, Haiku poems, Martin Luther King, Jr., endangered species (specifically a manatee), Charlotte's Web, Jackie Robinson, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, French, the Karner butterfly, Howe Caverns (incredible stalagmites/stalactites),  a pig for the teacher (she loves pigs), and fractions (fractions? really?).

I started on Sunday by making and coloring several batches of marshmallow fondant. I sculpted until I was sick of it, and planned to finish it all Monday night (caveat: I am not a sculptor. I have not attempted anything so intricate before). She needed them delivered on Tuesday night, so that worked well--if I had them done Monday, they would have time to dry and set up enough to avoid any problems in class on Wednesday. Things were turning out well, but taking forever, so on Monday night I gratefully put the horns on the Viking helmet, dumped the dishes in the sink, put the decorations in the oven to keep them from contamination, and hit the sack.

I telecommute, so I couldn't start the actual baking the next morning, which is the only step that I had left. So I took a late lunch and gathered all the ingredients and preheated the oven. I went back to check my email and came back to the kitchen.....and saw the decorations in the oven. I swore like a sailor, with language I don't care to repeat in front of my parents or any small (or not-so-small) children.  The decorations were melted. Ruined. Desecrated. Dead. The Eiffel Tower was a puddle. The boxing spider and lady bug had been reduced to blobs with eyes and red gloves. The globe--the globe that I had worked so hard on that you could actually recognize continents on it--had succumbed to global warming and sunk until only the northern hemisphere remained. The teepee was unrecognizable. Charlotte melted irretrievably into her web. Howe's stalagmites sagged over like a wilted flower. The portrait of Martin Luther King, the cursive sampler, the Haiku, and the fractions would have been salvageable, but they were stuck on top of each other. And the manatee! Oh...Wait... the manatee was kind of fine. Sure, he had some orange stuck on his tail from the stalagmites, but that can be scraped off, right? And the plant sprouting from the seed.... well, it's a little flat, but it will work. And the chickens in the sack for The Fantastic Mr. Fox...well, they were kind of saggy and some feet and a beak needed replacing, but I could probably save them, too.

I choked back my tears of panic--there was no time!--and got to mixing more fondant immediately. 14 hours of work down the drain, and I could only hope that I would be able to bake 20 cupcakes and icing from scratch and recreate 14 custom decorations in under 6 hours. I went into a zone of cold, methodical efficiency. I had done this all before. I had learned hard lessons. I could avoid those pitfalls now. I had enough black fondant left over that I could make smaller versions of the Eiffel Tower, the spider vs. lady bug, and Charlotte. Making black fondant is time-consuming. Takes lots of color and elbow grease. Time saved. By doing it the hard way before, I had learned the easiest way to shape a cone for a teepee. Breeze. I had painted MLK once, I could do it again. I already knew my Haiku. I gave up on a fondant butterfly and used chocolate, my tried-and-true. I had enough pink to make another pig. So what if the globe was only one-ish crooked hemisphere? It would do. I didn't eat, I didn't go to the bathroom, I didn't deviate. Cupcakes were in the oven as I was sculpting. As before, the Viking helmet and hammer were my last creation. Batch two of the cupcakes were in the oven as I made cream cheese frosting.

Uh oh. What is this? I had taken so long with everything else, and the day was so hot (mid-90s), that my ingredients had gone beyond the desired room-temperature and into melty. I put it in the fridge. It wouldn't set. I cheated and added shortening. It wouldn't set. I knew... I knew it was a bad idea, I knew I should use my tried-and-true buttercream, but she was paying for cream cheese. I should give her cream cheese, right? I frosted the cupcakes, and they drooped. I scraped the icing off, added more shortening, refrigerated it some more. Frosted again, put the decorations, on, put it in the fridge, and prayed. After half an hour in the fridge, I braved it, carried them the equivalent of three city blocks, and took them to the apartment. The good news? She LOVED the decorations. The bad news? The icing was sloppy and going everywhere. There was no way they would make it into class. We talked it over, and I left the cupcakes at her house in the cooler kitchen (no oven heat!) and zipped back to my place to make a quick batch of buttercream. Tip for all you bakers out there... putting an egg in warm-ish water and using defrost on cold butter for about 20 seconds brings everything to room temperature really quick.

I loaded my apron pockets with all the tools of my trade and extra fondant, and headed back to her apartment. Her husband and I meticulously took off every decoration and cleaned it, scraped the icing off of each cupcake, and fit them snugly in a couple of Pyrex dishes. I had them iced with the buttercream in less than two minutes, and then I put all the decorations back on. I snapped a couple of quick pictures, brushed the hair off my forehead, and stepped back. I was done. They looked...passable. Oh, she loved them. But they weren't what I normally aim for. And I was excited, because the husband is an amateur photographer, and he was going to take really good quality photos of the decorations.

Well, the thing is... I got out of there at about 11 PM. The poor guy fell asleep on the couch. He never took photos. I am KICKING myself for not at least taking photos of the decorations on their own. So, I've edited the snapshots as best I can to show my cupcakes.  But before I get to those, let me recap my lessons learned:

1) Always check the oven. Always. Even if you haven't baked anything for three months and there are cobwebs on the dials, check anyway.
2) Things go faster the second time around.
3) When you don't have time to panic, you can accomplish great things.
4) If something isn't working, trust your gut. You can save a lot of time later. If you have to take flack from a client for not giving them exactly what they want so that they can have a better product--well, who can argue with a better product?
5) Kids are totally awed by cool decorations and could care less about what the actual cupcake looks like.

So, with those lessons learned, I present the cupcakes. The angles aren't good, the closeups are poor, but I did what I could do.

The northern hemisphere. Pig in the foreground.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox by Roald Dahl. The clever fox would take chickens and toss them into a sack. There's one right-side-up chicken and two upside down chickens. Stalagmite tips in the foreground.

From top left to crooked right -- please note some are upside down: Fractions (tri-color fondant in thirds with a sign that says, "1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3 = 1 whole cupcake!), the Haiku (Five, seven, five\syllables in a Haiku\Poetry is fun!), the teepee, Fantastic Mr. Fox. Middle: French (Eiffel Tower and French flag), Charlotte's Web (I actually spelled "humble" in the web), the Northern Hemisphere, Howe Cavern Stalagmites. Bottom: The boxing ladybug vs. the spider (the kids counted the legs on each to make sure I was right), the pig.

Pastel chocolate version of the much bluer Karner Butterfly. Baseball for Jackie Robinson.

Black and white portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr., and over-sized (for a cupcake) manatee.

A cursive sampler, sheet music for the music teacher.

Not pictured: The viking helmet and hammer, plants and seeds and how they grow. 

Kitchen Sinks and Black-eyed....Gerbers?

I splurged this weekend. I had resolved that I wasn't going to spend any money on any non-essentials for two weeks. And then I got a 50% coupon in my email from Michael's and I couldn't stop the siren call from dragging me under. That's how Saturday found Sean and I in the baking aisle of the chain craft store, me dithering indecisively over various thingamajigs and widgets, and Sean patiently acting as basket-bearer and occasional sounding-board. I finally settled on a fondant and gumpaste flower-making kit (think flowers made out of a sugar dough, basically), and was all in a tizzy to get going. I reined myself in, though, at least for a day. Luckily, I was tasked with bringing dessert to a Memorial Day barbecue.

The traditional fondant, the kind that is usually used on wedding cakes to give them that smooth, utterly flawless look, isn't very tasty. It's difficult to make from scratch, and somewhat expensive to buy. That's why I use marshmallow fondant. I can make a batch myself for under $2, and even though it's still basically straight sugar, it tastes better than the traditional stuff. Gumpaste is sort of the same thing, except that it tastes worse, dries out faster, and is usually used to mold or shape flowers. I haven't made any of that myself yet, but it's easy enough to do.

Sean's office mates have been the lucky recipients of my experiments. I've sent in creamsicle cupcakes, sweet tart cupcakes, chocolate cupcakes with coffee frosting, mocha cupcakes with (real) Irish Cream frosting, and some tender and flaky not-your-average scones in the flavors of chocolate chip and orange rum spice.... and with all that selection, with all those unique flavors, they said that the traditional, nothing-special, comfort food Red Velvet was their favorite. As much as that tamped down on my desire for shocking new--yet tasty!--flavors, I recognize a good thing when I see it. Plus, I'm a purist at heart. I just believe in taking traditional comfort food flavors and making them the best they can possibly be.

So my decision was made. Red Velvet cupcakes for the barbecue. But what kind of flowers go with Red Velvet? I didn't want to try something too wacky right away, so I settled on a daisy. But a plain daisy is boring. What about a sunflower, or a gerber, or a....Black-eyed Susan! Feeling like the Black-eyed Susan was calling me home to my Idaho roots, I decided to go for that. I got a bit too carried away with the red coloring gel, though, and they came out a bit too orange. Meh. I can just called it a Black-eyed Gerber.

Using fondant instead of gumpaste was a bit challenging. They still came out beautiful, but required more work to make them so. After creating 14 flowers (which is really only 7, since they are double-layered), I gave up for the night. I put them all in the oven--off, of course--to dry overnight and keep them from any contamination. In the morning I took them out first thing so that I wouldn't make a stupid mistake and ruin them by turning on the oven. I whip up some completely ridiculous-over-the-top brownies (we're talking marshmallows, almonds, heath bars, chocolate frosting, and homemade caramel sauce), get the Red Velvet batter going and the cupcakes popped into the oven, and leave Sean to watch over them while I run to Michael's to redeem another coupon (can't use them on the same day, drat it all!) to pick up some color dust for the flowers.

I come back, and Sean says, "I pulled them out, but I wasn't sure what that other thing was in the oven, so I just left it there." I look at him in incomprehension for a moment, then go to the oven with a sinking feeling in my stomach. There, on the top rack, in a plastic, warped, non-oven-safe dish, is a poor, bloated, unrecognizable excuse for a fondant flower. I had missed one. Sadness. At least the dish was cheap and I had six more blossoms to work with. I colored some leftover fondant a dark brown, dusted it with gold pearl dust, poked holes in it with a ball tool to make it look pebbly, and set them aside so that I could highlight the petals with red pearl dust. I slapped them all together and viola! Black-eyed Gerbers. I couldn't stand to present a sub-par platter of cakes, though, with only six blossoms (turns out I only used five, anyway), among otherwise unadorned cupcakes, so I molded the rest of the fondant in some molds I already had, and painted them to give them a watercolor effect. Presto! A cupcake presentation that almost looked like it was meant to be that way!

I was inordinately proud. I snapped photo after photo. I carried them triumphantly through through the building, secretly hoping someone would be in the hallway to see (I dumped the brownies on Sean to carry). We get there, and everyone ooohs and aaaaahs over the cupcakes--especially after they realize that the daisies are sugar--and then attack the brownies like chocolate-loving wolves. I have never had so many compliments on something--and they were totally an afterthought! Oh, sure, when the "official" dessert time rolled around, people's eyes did roll back into their heads in cream-cheesy ecstasy. But I made those brownies because the hostess told me she liked completely over-the-top, super decadent, ridiculous desserts. They were off the cuff. Unplanned. Approached in the "kitchen sink" method. And after reviews like that.... well, I better write down what I did, quick, before I forget. There will always be a market for amazingly decorated cupcakes. But a smart business woman listens to her customers....even if the reviews take her completely by surprise!