To Have Your Cake and Eat It!

For Sean's mom's birthday this weekend, I made a mini-cupcake...cake!!! It was weeks of hard work, to produce a 49 mini-cupcake structure with 6 different flavours!! I still can't believe that we pulled it off.

It starts with the actual structure that Sean made out of high density foam.

In all, we tested 24 different flavours, which included ones like Iced Vovo, Rum and Raisin, Very Berry, etc, most of which didn't make the cut. What did, though, were:

Cowboys:
1 portion vanilla mini-cupcakes, baked.
1/2 tsp Baileys (per cupcake)
1/2 tsp Butterscotch schnapps (per cupcake)

Icing: 
1 portion Buttercream frosting
Cocoa Powder
Caramel Topping

I baked the mini-cupcakes from a generic vanilla cake recipe. Then, for the Buttercream icing, cream butter till fluffy, and slowly add the icing sugar and keep creaming. (I used about 750g of icing sugar to 500g of butter) Get out the portion that you want for the amount of cupcakes that you're covering, and add come cocoa powder and caramel topping.

When it's time to assemble, poke some holes into the baked (and cooled!) mini-cupcakes, and pour the alcohols in. Then frost to finish!

Chocolate Mint:
1 portion vanilla batter
Chocolate chips
Peppermint essence
1 tsp Creme de Menthe (per cupcake)

Icing:
1 portion butter cream frosting
Green and yellow food colouring
Peppermint essence
Chocolate buttons

In the vanilla batter, I folded in milk and white chocolate chips and peppermint essence. After they were baked and cooled, Creme de Menthe was added (again, poke holes in the cupcake) and the mint frosting went on, before topping with a chocolate button each.

Lemon Cheesecake:
1 portion vanilla cake batter
Lemon Zest
Lemon Juice
Lemon Essence
Citron Vodka

Icing:
Cream Cheese
Icing Sugar
Lemon Juice
Lemon Zest

In the batter, mix in some lemon juice (don't want the batter to be too runny!) and lemon zest to taste. After baking and cooling the cupcakes, poke holes in it and drizzle the citron vodka to taste. For the icing, just cream the icing sugar and the cream cheese, adding a little lemon juice to taste. Top with lemon zest.

Magarita:
1 portion vanilla cake batter
Lime zest
Orange Zest
Orange Juice
Lime Juice
Orange Essence
Triple sec
Tequila

Icing:
1 portion buttercream frosting
Lime Juice
Lime Zest

Fold in the essence, juices and the zests into the cake batter, then spoon into cupcake cases and bake. After the cupcakes have cooled, add the tequila and triple sec with a squeeze of lime juice. For the icing, mix in lime juice to taste, then top with lime zest.

Orange and poppyseed:
1 portion vanilla cake batter
Orange Zest
Orange Essence
Poppyseeds
Triple Sec

Icing:
1 portion Buttercream frosting
Orange Juice
Orange Essence
Orange Zest

Mix in the zest, essence and poppyseeds into the cake batter. After the cupcakes have been baked and cooled, drizzle triple sec onto it. For the icing, mix juice and essence (and food colouring if you want) into the basic buttercream frosting mixture, and then top with zest once frosted.

Pina Colada:
1 portion vanilla cake batter
Dried pineapple pieces
Dessicated Coconut
Tinned pineapple pieces (pureed)
Malibu Rum

Icing:
1 portion Buttercream frosting
Coconut essence
Dessicated coconut

Mix everything but the rum into the cupcake batter and bake. Once they have cooled, make holes in the top crust and drizzle Malibu rum into them. For the icing, mix in the coconut flavouring into the icing mixture, and top with dessicated coconut once frosted.

And those are the six flavours! I really must say though, that I couldn't have done it without Sean, Toni and Mel. They were my taste testers, frosters, sous chefs...everything!

Everyone also had a hand in assembling the cupcake structure (which, since I forgot to mention, is made out of the high density foam mentioned earlier, but covered in foil). 

And finally, when it was all done, everyone just heaved a sigh of relief.

Man that was a big task, but it turned out really well. =)

Here's to future cupcake endeavours!

Happy munching!