Celebration cupcakes

My parents commemorated their 40th wedding anniversary on Sunday. To celebrate, we had elevenses for about 70 family and friends. My sister-in-law and I did all of the catering and I had a baking binge last week to help us along. We also had two sessions making gumpaste flowers.

Among other things, I made cupcakes. This is the first time I had attempted to mass-produce cupcakes and also the first time I'd tried the recipes from my cupcake decorating course earlier this year. On Saturday morning, I baked 60 cupcakes, half each vanilla and chocolate. We piped milk and dark chocolate shapes for the chocolate cupcakes and had pre-made gumpaste flowers to decorate the vanilla cupcakes. On Sunday morning, extremely tired from having flown to Auckland overnight for the Simon & Garfunkel concert, I made one batch each of chocolate buttercream frosting and vanilla frosting, tinted a slight ivory colour. Then, I assembled the flowers and decorations into the finished products below.

I was thrilled to see the reaction from our guests, many of whom thought I'd ordered professionally made cupcakes. :-) Needless to say, they all disappeared quickly!

Vanilla cupcakes iced with buttercream frosting, tinted slightly ivory in colour and decorated with gumpaste flowers (hand made).

More vanilla cupcakes, with chocolate cupcakes in the background. Iced with chocolate buttercream frosting and finished with decorations piped from milk and dark chocolate.