St Patrick’s Day Green Velvet Cupcakes
No, I’m not Irish, I just love any excuse to bake! Would you eat green velvet cake?
Vanilla Ice cream and Chocolate Mud Cupcakes with Peppermint Buttercream Frosting
Update: And the winner is…
Q: What do you do with a chocolate mud cupcake that is just a little too crumbly?
A: Mix it with vanilla ice cream, top with peppermint buttercream frosting and enter it into December’s Cupcake Hero contest!
Cupcake Hero is a monthly cupcake baking competition, with a different key ingredient each month. Read about December’s theme here.
I decided to enter this month, however my poor chocolate mudcakes where just too crumbly for me to be happy. So I whipped out some vanilla ice cream and Voila! Chocolate and ice cream and peppermint and buttercream, er, cupcakes!
1. Take cool cupcakes and crumble into pieces. Mix the pieces with soft (but not too soft) vanilla ice cream.
2. Spoon ice cream mix into ramekins or small bowls.
3. Make buttercream frosting with a dash of peppermint essence and a tiny dash of green food colouring.
4. Pipe frosting onto the top of your “cupcake” and eat with a spoon!
Wilton No. 2110 (1M) Open Star Decorating Tip
Santa also brought a new tip for my piping bag. The No. 2110 (1M) is the attachment you need to create great big swirls of icing to pile on top of your cupcakes. It usually requires a large coupler (the plastic part to attach the tip to the bag), however, you could probably get away with not using one — just slide the tip into your bag. Here is a good explanation of how to make swirls with your No. 2110.
For Wilton products in Sydney, try The Essential Ingredient in Crows Nest, Peters of Kensington in Kensington or eBay. Unfortunately, Wilton’s online store does not ship internationally.
Wilton Icing Colors
Santa came early to Katie’s Kitchen, bringing with him some Wilton Icing Colors. They are small jars of colour paste, for colouring icing and fondant. A small amount of the paste will create a more vibrant and deeper coloured icing than supermarket-bought liquid food colouring. I find the paste is convenient when making coloured fondant, as you need only a small amount of paste, which means less colour ends up on your hands. For some tips on colouring icing click here and here.
The red and green fondant balls on the left (in the picture below) were coloured using Wilton Icing Colors “Red Red” and “Kelly Green”. The red balls on the right were coloured with a large amount of Queen Pillar Box Red Food Colouring. The Wilton colour is warmer than the pinkish tones of the Queen food colouring.
