The Last of the Summer Roses!

Hi all! Firstly I apologise for the delay in getting this post up as I was a tad busy over this past weekend! 

So this turn I stretched myself to try and make proper rose petal cupcakes for my beautiful niece Amelie Kennedy (Millie)! The actual cupcake mix was a simple all-in-one recipe from the oh so knowledgeable Mary Berry 

• 100g butter or margerine
• 150g caster sugar
• 150g self raising flour
• 2 large eggs
• 3 tbsp milk
• 1/2 tsp vanilla essence.

Chuck them all in the one (electric) mixing bowl and whiz 'em together. Ta Daa ready to pour in to all the cupcake cases. I used one large spoon (it's a serving spoon I have) which was enough mixture in each case. There's nothing worse than the cupcakes sunken below the top of the case, or they've risen above the case where you have to go cut off the top to even it out so you can ice properly (although this predicament usually is welcome in my house as we get to eat all the cut off tops of the cupcakes........ssshhhh don't tell anyone!!).

So let the cupcakes cook for approx 25 mins, and stick a skewer through them to check they're done completely through (skewer comes out clean), and place on a wire tray to cool.

For the butter cream I just mixed the usual icing sugar, butter and drop of vanilla essence in a large bowl. I find that if you add milk to the mix it goes too creamy and soft, which isn't good to make proper shapes such as the petals. So now for the piece de resistance..........you need your pot of red or pink icing colouring open to hand. You take your piping bag, with nozzle 127 in one hand and a small paint brush in the other. Find where the skinner point of the nozzle is, dip the paint brush in the colouring, and run the paint brush from the narrow part of the tip INSIDE the piping bag, in a straight line all the way to the top of the bag. The reason you need to be careful where you put the stripe is that the narrow part of the nozzle will be the tips of the petal, so this gets some darker colouring to give the real petal effect ya see!!! It'll all make sense soon my friends.

So take your piping bag and fill it with your pink coloured butter cream (don't worry you won't smudge the colour stripe!). With a full piping bag in one hand, and a cupcake in the other, you hold the nozzle directly over the centre of the cupcake at a 90 degree angle. Pipe a small mound, or standing heap, of butter cream to form your centre of the rose. Then carefully position you piping bag with the narrow end of the nozzle facing up to the ceiling and the wider end in the cupcake. Your wrist needs to be at a slight angle (here comes the carpel tunnel again!) and you pipe about 3 small upright arches surrounding the little mound of icing in the centre. So basically each base of the arches are actually on the cupcake itself, with slight lift in the centre. Three arches should suffice to go around your little centre. Then in between each arch you create another arch (possibly higher in height) so your next layer should have 5 arches......and so on.......

Here a guy on YouTube that shows the way to do the roses but even watch it for the pure entertainment, he's a made yoke!!

For the green "leaf effect" I got very lazy and just coloured some butter cream icing with green colouring and piped through a regular star nozzle coming out of the base of the flower/petals. I think the contrast in the colours are more appealing to the eye, and give it that real flower effect. If I was to do these again I would maybe go for a stripe of pink colouring instead of red up through the piping bag, just to give a softer look. It was commented that it looks like ham slices!!!!

Even though this piping effect looks the best, it really does take a lot of pressure on the wrist to tilt as your going around for the arches, whilst also putting pressure on the piping bag to squeeze out basically a lump butter mixed with sugar!! I found that the butter was starting to melt in the bag against my hand....which led to less stiff petals on a few cupcakes.

But when put all together they did look good (they were in this container to be transported up to my niece's christening in Dublin). If they didn't need to travel far I would have liked to put them in to a flower arrangement/basket but I is only learning all this malarkey ya see

Things I learned: 

1) I'm going to have to buy shares in Kerrygold and get deliveries of butter to my house in order to ensure I have enough butter cream for all the cupcakes (all the finicky bits see a lot of butter cream wasted).

2) Use less food colouring in the inside of the bag, or go a shade darker on the whole icing.

3) Do more wrist exercises!!!

4) Take pictures as I go along to help explain my method a lot better.

So stay tuned next time................