Featured in Sweet Bites!

My very own spring cupcakes with marzipan tulips were featured in the Sweet Bites newsletter by Bake It Pretty - my favorite online destination for inspiration and fun baking supplies. However random a happening it was that my cupcake photo was chosen along with only other two for the newsletter, I don't care. It was in there and it was directly under the cover of Jamie Oliver's new cookbook! Now that my eyes are healing, I'm planning to bake a few things this week. I think I'll try making Victoria sponge cake since my mum is visiting and will also try tackling homemade brioche.

Spring Cupcakes

I had found these pretty tulip inspired baking cups recently and thought I'd make some spring cupcakes to adorn with my pretty marzipan tulips and also try practicing some piping with some of the new pastry tips I found.

I used my favorite vanilla cake recipe from Billy's Bakery in New York. It's light and fluffy with a great vanilla taste. I made this same recipe for the vanilla cupcakes we had for Audrey's birthday party last year. It's very easy to make with mixing dry ingredients together and adding the wet ingredients to mix in the kitchenaid. It's makes such a glossy and smooth batter.

The recipe makes around 30 cupcakes and I filled all my tulips papers (it came in a pack of only 24) and also made an extra tray of 6 with some pretty pale pink papers. I considered these the test batch! When you put the batter in the tulip papers, the petals folded in a bit and looked so pretty!

Here they are out of the oven. They rose nicely and the only thing that annoyed me was you can see where the paper soaked in some oil from the batter, but the tips are dry. They also came out of the pans nice and held their own.

I made my favorite vanilla buttercream frosting and found it easy to not only put the pastry bag in a cup to fill it, but I folded the edge of the bag over the side of the glass so it wasn't as messy.

With the tulip papers, they probably weren't the best cupcakes to practice piping, but I was up for the challenge. I used a very large star tip and put a nice big swirl of light purple buttercream on top of each one. For the ones that I put the marzipan tulips in, I just spread some of the frosting on top so the tulip would stand out.

Marzipan in Bloom

I first tried to make marzipan last month around St. Patrick's day. After some difficulty and several hours, I ended up with marzipan, managed to color it and ended up with some cute marzipan shamrocks. I had made such a huge batch of marzipan, that I tried freezing it (wrapped in both plastic wrap and foil). I was ready to try molding marzipan again and wanted to be a bit more creative. To go with the season, I wanted to make some marzipan tulips and had seen these in my new marzipan book. Easy, right? Well, since I already had the marzipan made, it wasn't too bad.

I read in another baking book on how you can reconstitute dried marzipan. And, while the marzipan froze quite well, it was a bit dry after it thawed. I used a little bit of corn syrup and kneaded it quite a bit until it was nice and moist and mailable. I started by coloring it the color I wanted my tulips to be and just went with a bright yellow. After the color was kneaded through, I started with a small tube shape.

The tube was cut with a sharp paring knife into equal pieces for each of the tulip flowers.

Then, you molded each piece into a nice smooth cone shape.

Then, I took a pair of sharp kitchen scissors to cut slits in the tip of the cone to make the petals. The book had the petals pointed in, but I molded mine out just a touch.

Here are all my tulips! Once I had accomplished this piece of it, I read on to see how I could do the leaves and stem to finish them off. I used another piece of marzipan to color green, made the cones again and only cut one larger slit to make two leaves.

For the stem, the book suggested using spaghetti noodles (a 3 inch section) to color with food coloring to match the stem. I thought this was ingenious, but was actually out of spaghetti, which I couldn't believe. So, I found some small lollipop sticks, cut them in half and colored them green with a pastry brush. It worked great!

I was so proud of my marzipan tulips and proudly displayed them on top of my spring tulip cupcakes (see next post). I have more marzipan in the freezer and fun plans for things to make coming up!