Cupcake decorating

On Tuesday evening we attended a wonderful cupcake decorating class taught by Janet of Janet Mohapi-Banks Sculptural Cake Design. These weren’t any ordinary cupcakes though, these were Valentine’s cupcakes!

I’m sure most of us have baked cakes since we can remember and have made different flavoured butter and sugar icing, and I for one am guilty of just ‘dolloping’ it on top of the cupcakes, well there was no ‘dolloping’ to be seen here! Janet taught us a few different icing techniques with different types of icing too, so now I have no excuse!

We learnt how to make a Classic and a Rose Swirl with buttercream, though this had a twist to it, it was two tone! We had such a giggle with the paint! Below are mine (left) and Mr C’s  (right) attempt at the swirls. I think we made a fatal mistake of choosing blue and green for our paint, I’m not sure the colours compliment the elegance of the swirl (?!)

Then Janet showed us how to colour fondant icing and the tricks of the trade to placing the fondant topping smoothly and perfectly onto a cupcake. We then attempted the most difficult part of the class – a hand-pulled sugar rose! Below are mine (left) and Mr C’s (right) attempts, Janet kindly said that Mr C’s was more of a rose bud : )

Below is Janet’s signature cake “Rose”, on which there are 300 hand-pulled roses! To try to put that into context, it took me about half an hour to do just one small one (and not a very good one at that!).

We were then shown how to make our own piping bag to ice small delicate details onto cakes, such as hearts of course! This was also quite tricky, controlling the icing is quite difficult and once you’ve done it there’s no going back – I tried to rectify my wonky heart and it just looked more messy! Below are mine (left) and Mr C’s (right) finished works of art!

The satisfying end result – filled cupcake boxes to take home. Very tasty too, I’ve just munched away on one whilst writing this post! Below are some of the class attendees’ cupcake boxes, can you tell which were done by the steady hand of Janet!? : )

This class was just so much fun, but it also made me appreciate the skill, time and expertise that goes into decorating cakes. One lady there said that she admired Janet for what she does and another said that Janet had really inspired her – such lovely words! You also receive a leaflet containing details of the skills learnt, some recipes and the equipment and ingredients required, as a reminder for when you come to doing it flying solo. It’s a wonderful, fun and creative way to spend a couple of hours in the evening, why not take along a friend for a giggle too!

If you would like to learn some of these cake decorating skills and find out the tricks of the trade (or even just to go and taste Janet’s amazing buttercream!), Janet is holding various miniature cake, cupcake and cookie decorating classes throughout the year, for special occasions such as Mother’s Day, Easter, Weddings and Baby Showers! Happy cupcake decorating! x