Panda Cupcakes

Sometimes I have these fabulous ideas and I never follow through. I almost never try and make something happen.

It has been an interesting few months. Never thought I’d end up here but here I am. I’d love if this was all fun and games but its not and I really can’t wait to go back home. I’ve been thinking of what I would do when I go back home and I really think I should do something with my cooking/baking seriously this time. Take on a few orders and give it a shot. Trying to reach for the stars here but who knows really what can happen.

I took on my first cupcake order a few weeks back; 40 cupcakes for a 4 year old boy’s birthday. I don’t think I’ve ever made 40 cupcakes so I needed to keep the icing a bit simple. Especially with my dire lack of tools and ingredients it was a bit daunting to make tiny neat things. I’m really glad I gave it a shot. Sure they weren’t perfect but maybe the imperfection added to the quirky appearance of the little ……………………….

Pandas!

Doing some research before I made these cupcakes, I must say that there are a number of panda cupcake designs online. I am sure you could attempt most of them if you had the ingredients but I had to make do with what I had.

For the icing I used a normal butter cream icing, desiccated coconut, royal icing (brown and white) and a bit of chocolate icing.

I used a very basic chocolate cake recipe by Nigella (who else do you think of when you say chocolate cake?)

First I covered the cupcake with the butter cream frosting completely and dunked the top of the cupcake in desiccated coconut. If you live somewhere where you have an abundance of white dusting powder you can use that. Even though I initially just used coconut for the colour it ended up looking like fur which was perfect!

Next the eyes and ears. For this I used ready-to-roll royal icing that I have been raving about in previous posts. Only problem is its white. So you will have to colour the icing to make it black or dark brown for this. If you have ready made black fondant then problem solved: D I had to add a lot of black and brown colour to get the right colour. Again I had no gel colours so I used food colouring which I definitely will not recommend for this. The consistency of the colour won’t remain the same and it is so messy to handle when you add liquid colour to royal icing. Go find the gel!

Once I had shaped the black part of the eye I just stuck a tiny ball of white icing on top. Used the back of a satay stick dipped in black colouring to add more detail.

The mouth was just chocolate icing piped out of a bag and the nose was a normal sized chocolate chip.

I really enjoyed this because….. it worked out! :D I thought I was creating Frankenstein but who knew they would actually be kind of cute.

So my first cupcake order has been a success and I am looking forward to maybe doing a few more before I leave Sri Lanka. Ill be here till the 22^nd of December so If you know someone who’d like some cupcakes give me a call.