Flowery Cupcakes

The other day I wanted to make some cupcakes, but I didn't have any butter (or margarine). But then I remembered an idea from the back of my mind that you can use oil instead. So I looked online for a recipe and I found one here.

So I made up the mix like it said. It's a different colour to what I'm used to. And it tastes a little different. But it's definitely cake.

So I put it in its cupcake liners and into the oven. And when I checked on them ten minutes later, I found that they had risen much more than expected.

After they'd cooked and cooled I started to think about decorating them. I wanted to do something a bit more fun than just plonking icing all over them.

I figured as it's spring now (apparently), I would work from a signs of spring theme. So I thought I'd make some flowers out of sweeties. I went in the shop and I found fruit pastilles and marshmallows.

And I thought I could maybe squish the fruit pastilles to make petals for my flowers but it didn't work - they kept springing back into shape.

So then I thought they'd be more pliable if I heated them a little bit, and that's where I got the idea for baking them. I put five sweets in a circle on a baking tray and I put them in the oven (at 200 C) until they melted and all merged into one shape. Then I took the flower out of the oven and used a knife and a spoon to mold the shape a little. And the sweets started sticking to the tools so I found my grapeseed oil and coated the tools in it to stop the stickiness.

Then I put sweets on my tray for five more flowers, because that's how many sweets I had left.  And this time I watched them more carefully and just cooked them until they started to look a little tiny bit melty (about 5 or 6 minutes). Then I took them out of the oven and squished the petals with my oily spoon. These flowers fell apart more easily than the first one, but they look better.

After everything had cooled down, I made up some icing and covered 6 of my cupcakes. Then I put a fruit pastille flower on each one and iced a little marshmallow in the middle. I think they look pretty cool.

Then I hunted through my cupboards and found half a block of marzipan that I'd completely forgotten was there. It's a good colour for daffodils, I feel.

I got 6 little blobs of marzipan and squashed them into diamond type shapes. Then I pushed the six pieces together to make a starry flower type shape.

Then I made a bunch of those.

I got some orange food colouring gel and kneaded it into a chunk of marzipan. Then I put in some more orange because it wasn't orange enough. And some more. Once it was orange enough, it was too sticky so I rolled it around in icing sugar until I could handle it.

For each daffodil I made a flat oblong shape, and then I rolled it up to make a tube. I pushed the tube onto a star flower and then I pulled the edges of it outwards to look a bit more flowery. This took patience. And in a few cases I had to eat the bit I was failing to work with and start on that one again. Especially with the really little ones.

Anywho, here's a bunch of marzipan daffodils.

And then I made some cream cheese frosting and coloured it green. Cream cheese frosting is what happens when you mix butter, icing sugar and cream cheese. It's good.

And I frosted my remaining cupcakes and put some daffodils on each one.

And then I put them next to the fruit pastille flowers for a photo shoot.