Gumpaste flowers

Next week, I am throwing a party for 60-80 people for a family celebration. Somehow I thought it would be a great idea to make cupcakes instead of a celebration cakes. I'm going to bake two big batches, one each of chocolate and vanilla, and pipe them with buttercream frosting. Then, to finish them off, I'd make a range of little gumpaste flowers and use them as decorations. Voila!

So, I went shopping online and bought all the bits and pieces I'd need to get me going. Turns out it's quite a lot, even in addition to tools I've collected so far. Never mind - I'll be able to use all this stuff for years.

This afternoon, my sister-in-law came around and we tried to make sense of all the bits and pieces. Our aim was to have all the flowers made in advance so that on the big day we'd only need to pipe the buttercream frosting and insert the finished decorations. Easy peasy. It's been a couple of months since I completed my cupcake decorating course, but I've been practising and experimenting ever since and am still excited about how creative baking can be.

Between us, we managed to output a grand total of six large daisies (sans centres), six smaller daisies, six blue pansies (again, sans centres), about twenty stamped blue forget-me-nots, and a very wonky hand-crafted rose each. And that's it!

Pansies and daisies propped up in egg cartons so they dry curved

Minature daisies, forget-me-nots and pansies

Plan B is to only decorate the vanilla buttercream cupcakes with flowers and make chocolate piped decorations for the chocolate batch. I know I can produce them a lot faster than the flowers! We also need to have another flower-making early next week, otherwise we'll be on to Plan C.