Chinese Cupcakes
I've been taking evening Mandarin classes for a year now, and I made these for my final class this Wednesday. I really hope some of my current class continue onto the second year with me!
They read 'qǐng chī wǒ' ('please eat me'), as a sort of Chinese version of the 'eat me' treats in Alice and Wonderland. I wrote the characters with an edible ink pen because the icing rounds I stamped out were too teeny-tiny too pipe on.
I had a bit of a logistical nightmare with these. First of all, the individual boxes I had bought to present them as gifts turned out to all have the wrong sized inserts (the things that stop the cupcakes from sliding around inside the box), so I had to cut every one of them down, and even then they didn't fit properly. This also made getting the cakes themselves into the boxes without smushing the icing quite tricky (but I managed it, with only one casualty: thank goodness I made spares).
The second problem was my decision to use a brand of ready-to-roll, pre-coloured icing I've never used before. I saw it in the store and picked it up because it was meant to be a natural alternative to all that fake stuff you get in food colouring (and a lot of food colouring is needed for that bright a red). However, in trying to be a smartarse and not poison people with e-numbers, I ended up using an icing that tasted really weirdly tangy. I only realised my error when I'd boxed everything up and took a huge bite out of the smushed cake I mentioned above. Bleurgh.
Thankfully the icing rounds are solid, so they're easy to just lift off. I'll just have to tell everyone I give these to not to eat the red icing. A shame since I spent so much time on them, but what can you do. Anyway, in the future I'll be sticking to unhealthy, delicious e-numbers.
They read 'qǐng chī wǒ' ('please eat me'), as a sort of Chinese version of the 'eat me' treats in Alice and Wonderland. I wrote the characters with an edible ink pen because the icing rounds I stamped out were too teeny-tiny too pipe on.
I had a bit of a logistical nightmare with these. First of all, the individual boxes I had bought to present them as gifts turned out to all have the wrong sized inserts (the things that stop the cupcakes from sliding around inside the box), so I had to cut every one of them down, and even then they didn't fit properly. This also made getting the cakes themselves into the boxes without smushing the icing quite tricky (but I managed it, with only one casualty: thank goodness I made spares).
The second problem was my decision to use a brand of ready-to-roll, pre-coloured icing I've never used before. I saw it in the store and picked it up because it was meant to be a natural alternative to all that fake stuff you get in food colouring (and a lot of food colouring is needed for that bright a red). However, in trying to be a smartarse and not poison people with e-numbers, I ended up using an icing that tasted really weirdly tangy. I only realised my error when I'd boxed everything up and took a huge bite out of the smushed cake I mentioned above. Bleurgh.
Thankfully the icing rounds are solid, so they're easy to just lift off. I'll just have to tell everyone I give these to not to eat the red icing. A shame since I spent so much time on them, but what can you do. Anyway, in the future I'll be sticking to unhealthy, delicious e-numbers.
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