Valentine's Day

Lol, so keeping up to date seems to be a bit of an issue.In recent news, St. Valentine's Day! Hmm... Anyway, I was inspired by Bakerella to make a choc-box cake with fondant and some fondant dipped cupcakes. Dis. Aster. But funny. First of all, dyeing fondant red is just about impossible. I got a dark pink (no photos, too embarrassing) which I then made into a pink/white marble because I was getting fed up with trying to add colour. Black is also a crap option. Grey fondant does not look appetising.

So after cobbling a box together (I should have known from the gingerbread house that building and I are not cut out for each other) with soft, floppy fondant I decided that topping it with dipped fondant cupcakes would at least hide the hideous box. I googled "dipped fondant" and it seemed simple enough: microwave fondant on low, fondant melts, dip cake. I like a 3-step process.

Sadly disaster and I are intimately acquainted and it felt the need to up the ante in our relationship. Firstly, hot fondant burns. Which hurts. Any chef can tell you that sugar melts at a pretty high temperature and then does this lovely sticking-to-you thing that we all love. Hot and sticky. Owies. Secondly while it's keen to stick to you, it's not that enamoured by cake. Cake it can take or leave. Or just leave. Sans icing. Ice, you bastards! Eventually I managed to cajole some icing to stay on some cupcakes and even managed a bit of decorating before they dried rock hard. Oh well.

A slightly more successful story was these weird hearts that I made. In a moment of insanity I decided that Bakerella's cake-pop recipe was really just a basic concept that could be applied to any cakey type design. Little did I know this was the step over the safety barrier while waving madly at oblivion. But I managed. I think.
So the process is to make a cake. Then mush cake with icing. Mold and decorate at whim. 3 Steps. Sounds simple enough. (mwahahaha says evil basement-cake in the distance)

So crumbling a cooked cake:


Mixing cake with icing...

Here's where it gets messy. Cake with icing is gloriously, dangerously soft.


Thank goodness part of the gig is to freeze the shapes so that they become a bit more workable. Which it did, until I started pouring fondant on top. Hmmm. In the end I used writing icing to outline the heart shape and then poured into the shape and it seemed to hold the fondant onto the heart quite well. It all got very sticky and messy. They look kinda cute here though...



And they were all the way in the car with the fondant box from hell. One of these is probably enough to induce immediate diabetic comas however. I might stick to biscuits and leave cake as cake.