Hello, those of the Thoughts.
Today I'd like to talk about cupcakes.
First, yum.
That being said, let's move on to my point at hand.
Cupcakes are a wonderfully versatile dessert. They can be anything! You can have any type of flavor. You can decorate them any kind of way. Make them for your kids to take to school or for a bridal shower. And they're relatively easy to make--especially if you use a store mix. It's the decorating that can take awhile.
I was looking through my RSS reader where I get several feeds of different recipe types from Taste of Home. Over the course of yesterday and today there were four that were all for decorating cupcakes with winter themes: snowmen, snowflakes, poinsettias and stars. Taste of Home had worked with Karen Tack and Alan Richardson, authors of Hello, Cupcake! which is a really awesome book on different ways to decorate cupcakes: sunflowers, aliens, shark attacks, alligators, TV dinners (seriously!)...you get the idea.
Now, I have great respect for Ms. Tack and Mr. Richardson, but some of these decorations can literally take hours. No joke. I have that cookbook. I've even tried their directions on making a group of cupcakes look like spaghetti and meatballs:
And on the whole, it was pretty neat to make and to show people. Even more fun to try to get them to eat. It took me about forty five minutes to decorate--this is one of their easier decorating recipes.
But some of their designs are highly highly complex but no less awesome:
TV Dinner Cupcakes
Werewolf Cupcakes
Sunflower Cupcake
Christmas Ornament Cupcakes
Beautiful creations. You almost don't want to eat them. Wonderful of Ms. Tack and Mr. Richardson to share their cupcake decorating knowledge with us.
And while I am an advocate of presentation when it comes to serving food, I almost wonder if this is too much.
Don't get me wrong--I had a lot of fun making my spaghetti cupcakes, but you should see the directions and lists of materials necessary to produce some of these designs! We're talking pages of materials and directions--that TV Dinner one goes on for four pages and it only yields six cupcakes!
But decorating recipes of this nature--and not all of their recipes are as complex as the four pictured above--require skill in techniques such as frosting and dipping and working with candy and food coloring. While some us may not be that great at it to start with, we can always make more cupcakes to practice on. And I'm sure you'll find no end to people willing to try your practice results.
This is certainly a fun and yummy way to improve one's decorating skills to be sure.
So I'm curious--would any of you spend three or four or more hours decorating cupcakes? How long is a reasonable time to you?
And if any of you are up to the challenge, make some cupcakes, decorate them in the most unique way possible, and send me pictures of what you make. And I'll make a photo album of Thoughtsters' Cupcakes--some of the most unique I'll post in a blog was well
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