Thursday, July 12, 2012

Individual Cupcakes with STYLE!

It feels like such a long time since my last post! The Safari themed birthday I did in June definitely warrants an entry, as it gave me the opportunity to work with some new materials!
The client, Samira, was referred to me by my friend / co-worker / fellow cake maker, Lisa (Lisa was unable to make this cake since she gave birth to a precious baby girl only days prior!). Samira was having a safari themed event for her daughter's 1st birthday (complete with petting zoo!). S sent me several pictures of some cakes she liked, and asked if I could make other things - like cookies and lollipops! 
 
So I spent some time pulling together a proposal... and since Samira had never eaten my cupcakes before, I brought her a sample. 

We ended up doing three kinds of cupcakes, totaling 30 - black forest (so devil's food cake filled with cherry), carrot, and yellow - and Samira chose to have the light cream cheese frosting (from the carrot cake) on all of the cupcakes. We needed a topper cake for the cupcake tier, (for the 1 year candle, etc) and we decided that giraffe made the most sense (from options including leopard and zebra)... I was able to find giraffe printed paper for the cupcake wrappers and added the pop of color with pink cupcake wrappers...  I mirrored the giraffe paper as I free-hand cut the chocolate fondant for the topper cake.

For the cookies, I used royal icing to create the super smooth leapard and zebra frosting and was thrilled with the way they all turned out! The lollis - zebra, elephant, giraffe, and lion - were all delicately "built" by me too. The process involves a reverse layering of colored melted chocolates... the mold themes available are endless!
It was REALLY cool to see this all come together... it was even MORE cool to see how excited Samira (and her family) was when it all arrived and we put it together.... and even better when I heard from Samira the next day... 





"Thank you so much for everything yesterday everything was delicious and people couldn't stop raving about how beautiful it all was."

BACK IN MAY, Bobbi turned 1 too!  Her mom, Christy, who has ordered a few traditional cupcakes cakes in the past, decided to go with individual cupcakes for this event.  I made 70 cupcakes for this party, with 70 custom BRIGHT pink and yellow cupcake wrappers to go with the "bee" theme! What a blast and SO pretty!  (With so many cupcakes, I used two boards... which when put together say, "Happy Birthday Bobbi"...in case the photos are confusing...)


left side

right side