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.
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| The northern hemisphere. Pig in the foreground. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| Pastel chocolate version of the much bluer Karner Butterfly. Baseball for Jackie Robinson. |
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| Black and white portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr., and over-sized (for a cupcake) manatee. |
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| A cursive sampler, sheet music for the music teacher. Not pictured: The viking helmet and hammer, plants and seeds and how they grow. |
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