Modern Vintage Cupcakes Hands-on Workshop

Last Friday, I attended a Modern Vintage Cupcake Decoration Hands-on Workshop at Shermay's Cooking School conducted by Chef Jackie Tay. The workshop focused on basic techniques and applications in using fondant, gumpaste and edible icing images, and I got to decorate 6 cupcakes during the 4hr workshop :)

Although I shun away from fondant and gumpaste in my bakes because I don't like their cloyingly sweet and chemical taste, I do agree that fondant and gumpaste can create intricate and pretty looking edible decorations that look too good to eat.

When I saw the workshop put up at Shermay's Cooking School, I was immediately tempted because the cupcakes look irresistibly pretty and the vintage old English kind of theme appeals to me. It's always good to learn more, in case I may really need to apply fondant, gumpaste or icing images on my bakes in future. Moreover, I still have some credits left over from my expiring membership.

Here's my work. Sweet looking right? I couldn't bare to eat them!

Each student was provided with all the tools and materials but only edibles could be brought home. The earl grey cupcakes were pre-baked already, recipe was given in the recipe pack.

First we had to level the cupcakes and then prepare the fondant for the cupcake surface. Realised it's not that easy to smoothen the fondant surface.

Next, we cut the edible icing images and lay them on top of the fondant surface. Basically any images can be printed onto icing sheets with edible ink and there are a number of suppliers in Singapore that provide the printing service albeit quite expensive; an A4 size icing sheet cost about $12! Actually most ink jet printers could do the job so long as you have special edible ink cartridges but I guess maintenance would be an issue and it's not practical to have an ink jet printer dedicated to icing image printing only at home unless doing such printing regularly.

We then proceed to make buntings, bunny silhouette, butterflies, sugar plaque, pink carnation and english rose using fondant and gumpaste. I was so absorbed in making them that I forgot to take photos along the way.

At the end of the workshop, my 6 cupcakes for takeaway!

This carnation is my favourite of all the designs, created using 3 layers of gumpaste cut-outs from 3 sizes of PME carnation cutters. The difficulty in this was rolling the gumpaste till paper thin and then rolling the edges of the petal using a tool to create a slight ruffle effect.

I like this hand moulded English Rose as well. As this is done using free hand petal by petal, it's the most tedious of all the designs. Each petal had to be paper thin as well so that the rose could look soft and realistic.

The gumpaste butterflies were created using a motif stamp so it's not difficult but have to handle very carefully as it's very flimsy. The sugar plaque was made using fondant cut-outs of 2 circles. The outer edge of the plaque was then crimped using a crimper to create a raised ruffle design.

The bunny was quite straight forward, simply traced the silhouette from a bunny cut-out on a piece of gumpaste. The base was just a scalloped plaque stamped from fondant.

The buntings were cut-outs from leftover icing images and glued onto the fondant surface. The rope, bow and rose bud made using gumpaste.

This was the simplest design of the six. Just cut out a circle using scalloped stamp then cut out a smaller circle using another circular stamp. Although this was very straightforward, it was not easy to make sure the circles look balanced.

I was very glad to attend the workshop and gained useful knowledge and tips that I'm sure would be useful one of these days :)

Did I eat the cupcakes? Well, I ate half a cupcake just to try. Still don't like the taste of fondant, gumpaste as well as the icing image :( Doesn't matter, so long as they are pretty to look at!