Flower Garden Cupcakes

As you can probably tell, most of the cakes and bakes I do are for kids' first birthdays. Lots of cartoony stuff like Frozen, Hello Kitty or animals with rainbows and ponies. So, I always get a little bit nervous when I have to do an "adult" birthday, especially when it involves flowers.

Flower Garden Cupcakes

These cupcakes are vanilla cupcakes, layered in rainbow colours. One should always bake rainbow cupcakes in white liners so that the pretty colours show through. To make rainbow cupcakes, just mix up your favourite vanilla cupcake batter, divide the batter into bowls and add food colouring. Then, spoon coloured batter into piping bags (one colour per bag). 

rainbow batter

Snip the tip off the bag and pipe a small amount into a paper-lined muffin pan. Remember, you only want to fill your cupcake liners a maximum of 2/3 full so go easy on the the amount of batter you pipe in, especially if you have many colours to do. (I did 5 and I still managed to over-fill the first dozen that I baked). 

pipe the batter in carefully to get neat, distinct layers

filled these a bit too much!!

If you like, use the back of a spoon to gently spread the batter for each layer to cover the colour beneath it. Bake them in the oven and watch your pretty rainbow cupcake grow. 

side view of the rainbow cupcakes

So, I cheated with the "domes" on these cupcakes. I made the toppers way in advance, before I even baked the cupcakes, so I had to find a way to make domes without shaping the fondant over the actual frosted cupcakes. Solution: use plastic balls! 

shaping the fondant into "domes"

After rolling and cutting the fondant into circles and then rolling an impression roller over to create texture, I sprinkled each plastic ball with icing sugar, and formed the fondant circle on top to create a dome! Genious, right? By the way, I used the caps for my baby's bottles to hold the balls in place while the fondant dried! Haaaa.

mini roses

On top of each dome, I made a bunch of different flowers. I used a silicone mold to create the red roses. For the tulips, I formed a raindrop-shaped bud, and then wrapped three circles of fondant around the bud. I rolled some green fondant into a long, thin snake and cut that into thirds for the stems. 

a trio of purple tulips

For these daffodils, I winged it and free-hand cut some pentagons, pinching the corners together so it formed a sort-of star shape, and then rolled up darker yellow circles into cylinder shapes and stuck those to the middle of the flowers using some water. I think they turned out alright.

"daffodils"

This purple rose was formed by arranged flat circles around a raindrop-shaped bud, making sure not to wrap them too tightly around the bud so that the petals open up a pit. I used a rose calyx cutter to make the leaves, lightly indenting the centre with the back of a knife. 

top view of a rose

The bunches of light pink flowers were super easy to make, since I just used a tiny plum blossom flower plunger cutter, and added dots of white royal icing for their centres. I used royal icing to stick them all together on top of the pre-made fondant dome as well. If you use your imagination, or cross your eyes a little, maybe these will pass off as Gladiolas. Ha!

lots of mini plum blossoms

I'm not even sure what these dark blue flowers are suppose to be, but I used a 5-petal rose cutter to cut them out, and then let them dry upside down over a small ball of fondant so they dry in a cup shape. Then I added a small ball of yellow fondant for their centres. I love that I finally got to use my silicone leaf vein press to make the leaves for most of these cupcakes.

dark blue daisies to mimic "hydrangeas"

These daisies were also simple to make. I used a medium-sized daisy plunger cutter to cut out the flowers, and again let them dry into a "cup" shape draped upside down over a small fondant ball. For the centre of the daisies, I rolled some yellow fondant into a ball, and then cut it in half. I stuck the halves into the centre of each daisy, and then poked holes all over it using a toothpick. 

daisy flowers

For the lettering, I used a plain font tappits cutter. I get frustrated with the tappits cutter at times, because I'm not patient enough to let the paper-thinly rolled fondant dry for 5 minutes before cutting the letters out. Then the fondant gets stuck in the tappits cavity and I have to use a toothpick to scrape it clean. Of course, by the time I'm done cleaning out the tappits, the fondant is a little dry and it's then the perfect time to actually cut out the letters and tap them cleanly out of the cutter. Go figure. 

clean fondant lettering

I think the flowers turned out pretty sweet, considering that I didn't actually use any proper techniques to make these flowers! So, to assemble, I frosted each rainbow cupcake with a mound to vanilla Swiss meringue buttercream, and then plopped each fondant flower-decorated dome on top. 

a colourful garden of cupcake flowers

I hope these flower garden cupcakes made the sweet birthday lady smile on her special day. Happy Sweet Birthday, Laila!

Flowers for a sweet birthday