All That Icing: Looking Back

Wow- I can't believe I decorated over 30 different designs of cupcakes over these 3 weeks! I gained a lot of useful skills, techniques, and I had loads of fun doing it! Here's a look at my work station:

Pretty messy, huh?

After collecting peer review, a few of my peers had some questions.

Q: How long did it take to make each cupcake?

A: Each cupcake varied in time, as did each theme. To elaborate, the Intensely Rainbow cupcakes took me about 2-3 hours, while the Fruitastic! cupcakes only took less than an hour. This depended on factors such as the type of icing I was using, what the designs were, and how hard the techniques would be to learn. Preparation is key, and for some themes, the preparation times were longer. For example, the Intensely Rainbow cupcakes required 6 different colours of icing, as opposed to the simple white buttercream icing the Fruitastic! cupcakes needed. In general, each cupcake took from as short as 2 min to as long as 10 min to decorate.

Q: Which cupcake was my favourite to decorate?

A: To be honest, I enjoyed creating the majority of them. However, the sunflower cupcake from the set "Summery Flora" was definitely the most enjoyable and had the most successful results. When I saw this cupcake online, I thought it looked really detailed and visually appealing. As well, I wasn't quite sure on how it would turn out, given that I used my own homemade piping tools (the petal shape). Piping without piping tips took some time getting used to how I should hold the bag, and how much pressure I should apply to it. On the other hand, I was pleasantly surprised when I saw the finished product- out of all the cupcakes in this theme, the sunflower decoration was the most realistic.

Q: What were the tools that I used to decorate the cupcakes?

A: To decorate my cupcakes, I used a variety of plastic piping tips, as well as sandwich bags. Furthermore, for some patterns, I made my own tips. Here are some of the equipment I used: