Wedding Cupcakes

It was a pleasant surprise to me when the bride, Jia Ying, daughter of Janet, my golf "kaki", asked me if I could bake cupcakes for her wedding cocktail reception. I was both excited and a little anxious as this was my first time baking cupcakes for such an important occasion - a wedding.I started trawling the internet and books for ideas on how to frost and decorate the cupcakes. Pink is the favourite color of the bride. Thus I decided on a white and pink theme. Next, what cupcake flavours should I bake? That's any easy one - good old vanilla and chocolate cupcakes to go with vanilla swiss meringue buttercream. The recipes are taken from Rose Beranbaum's Rose's Heavenly Cakes book. The cupcakes turned out to be soft, moist and flavourful, especially the vanilla ones.

To me, the most exciting and challenging part is making the sugar paste flowers to go on the frosting. It's my first time making sugar paste flowers. The last time I used sugar paste was making the angry birds for my son's birthday. I started flipping Mich Turner's Cake Masterclass book for instructions to shape and mould the flowers. I bought Wilton's gumpaste and added the pink edible colouring to knead them into two different shades of pink. The rose in the book looked so beautiful to me and I decided to mould a rose. I thought it would be a difficult task but it turned out to be pretty easy and manageable. It reminded me of making paper roses when I was in school many years ago. Once the roses were done, I decided on a simple flower with 5 petals. I used a flower cutter to cut out the shape and used my tools to shape the flowers. Looked like cherry blossom flowers to me. In order for the flowers to hold their shape while being dried, I placed them on a box that used to hold Nespresso capsules. It worked beautifully. Since I have only of such boxes, I have to hunt for another box to hold the flowers. It's a Ferrero Rocher box. It's always good to keep one or two of such boxes. You never know when you'll ever need them.

I baked the cupcakes one day in advance and did the frosting and decorating the next day. Just in time to deliver them to the hotel at 5pm. My daughter helped me to put them up on the cupcake stand. Job done!
My friend, Christine, helped to doll me up before the dinner as she was there to do the makeup for Janet and her younger daughter. That saved me the headache of whether to go back home to change after setting up the cupcakes. Thank you, Chris!
It has been a very fun and exciting experience. It's a privilege to be able to be part of the wedding. Thank you, Janet and Jia Ying. The cupcakes were all gone before the wedding dinner started. And I received compliments from Jia Ying about the cupcakes. Boosted my confidence to take in such jobs in future.