Cupcake Art- Obama Cupcake Mosaic

Cupcake Art- Obama Cupcake Mosaic

February 2009

The post has announced that Zilly Rosen will be recreating her Obama cupcake mosaic this weekend for Family Fun Day at the Smithsonian. Read the article here if you would like to attend the Smithsonian event.

You can also watch the mosaic of 5,000 cupcakes take shape on the videocam here: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/smithsonian-on-ustream.tv. It started at 2pm, but might take a while.

(Thanks to Amy for sending me this article!)

Princess Tiara Cake

Princess Tiara Cake

February 2008

I love how this cake came out. Fine, I am partial to girly cakes and princesses, what can I say?! It was for a fabulous princess-themed 1st birthday party and I was really excited that the birthday girl was already decked out in her princess dress when I arrived to set up the cake. Adorable.

I've seen a few tutorials on making a tiara/crown out of royal icing and I thought this would be an excellent chance to give it a try. It was a giant disaster. They looked lovely on the mold, but always ended up as shards of sugar during the drying process.

Royal icing tiara before it was reduced to powder. You can almost see it slipping out of my hand here.

So I tried a new tactic. I used a more simplified version of my template and rolled gumpaste into thin lines. This gave it much more structural stability and more flexibility for attaching embellishments like beads and glitter. And every princess knows it is all about the accessories.

Here are the two final gumpaste tiaras getting packed up for the car. The bottom one ultimately earned a place on top of the cake.


Cake Details:
Cake: One tier chocolate and one tier vanilla bean
Filling: Raspberry and buttercream for the chocolate cake layer, and chocolate ganache for the vanilla tier
Icing: Vanilla buttercream
Decorations: Fondant circles and beaded border and a handmade sugarpaste tiara with edible glitter (though no one actually ate the tiara I hope)

Sparkly Cupcake Cake

Sparkly Cupcake Cake

February 2008

I had a hard time titling this post because of the recent wave of "cupcake cakes" which are trays of cupcakes spackled together with icing. I am morally opposed to this plan because I appreciate both the stand alone cupcake and the traditional birthday cake model. I have never found cutting up the cake to be THAT difficult, and I think most people can handle the anticipation for the full 90 seconds it takes to circulate plates and forks. Don't worry, I just stumbled off that soapbox and will now continue with today's cake.

So, back to our story. This cake has a picture of a cupcake on it (which is very sparkly) and was served with a tray of cupcakes that had coordinated frosting. This way people choose between vanilla bean cake and chocolate cupcakes. A little something for everyone! I like this plan because I really like birthday candles to be in a real cake, but I would never deny anyone the fun of a cupcake. Especially not on their birthday.

Cake Details:
Cake: Vanilla Bean Birthday Cake

Filling: Chocolate ganache and mini chocolate chips

Icing: Vanilla buttercream

Decorations: Piped buttercream and fondant decorations with edible glitter

* not appearing: Chocolate cake and buttercream cupcakes in yellow and pink with rainbow sprinkles.