Valentine Cupcakes

Finally after 2 hours of hard work into the night we have completed decorating 60 cupcakes. We opted for a simple yellow cupcake and the pics you see above are the cupcakes frosted with royal icing. Now, the great thing about royal icing is how easy it is for absolutely anyone to handle it. Its a amazing tool to use for cake decoration and besides cupcakes we also use it to ice our gingerbread men during Christmas. However, it usually doesn't taste very good which is a pity seeing how lovely it looks. The icing hardens after some time and what you will get is a candy like crust which is extremely sweet seeing just how much icing sugar goes into the recipe. The cupcakes were decorated with little sugar hearts and dragees and I would say the results was pretty satisfying.




Now as you could have guess I am not a fan of royal icing. I'll opt for something more tasty and with more...ooomph! So we tried a chocolate ganache frosting recipe we've got. It called for a combination of bitter-sweet and un-sweeten chocolate, perfect for the chocolate lovers that are us. But we were met with a very puzzling situation after the frosting was all ready to be piped on, something we came to term: Mystery of the Chocolate Ganache Frosting!

Perhaps I'm dramatizing it a little but it is indeed very peculiar when there appears to be a minty taste in your frosting even though there wasn't any mint added to the recipe. We fretted over this quite some time. Could it be that the chocolate we used were previously stored in a container with mint in it? But that's impossible! The only source of mint in our kitchen comes in the form of peppermint essence. What about toothpaste then? Toothpaste has a minty taste. Now that's even more absurd, we don't keep toothpaste in the kitchen!

So after we all had our chance to play "Kitchen Detective", the Mystery of the Chocolate Ganache still eludes us. So if any of you have any idea how our chocolate frosting can decide to go mint, please do do tell us.

All in all, despite the little mysteries that concluded our cupcake baking experience, we had a lovely time creating these little beauties and I'm glad to say that I'm pretty motivated to continue experimenting with cupcakes. So yes, we had our qualms about these cakes but here at Cooked with Love, we are also suckers for all things pretty and cupcakes.....what can I say, they're gorgeous

-Rachel-