A cupcake lesson

I missed out on a friend’s party because of work commitments so I wanted to make some cupcakes to apologise for my absence. But I didn’t wake up as early as I should have and I was cruelly reminded of a very important lesson – do not make cupcakes in a rush! Actually, do not make anything that needs to be iced in a rush. My little guys were almost cool when I was forced to try icing them. Almost cool was not good enough. The icing melted into sad little buttery pools. There were no cupcakes going anywhere any time soon.

While it was too late for the party, I did fix the botched cupcakes later. I just cut off the spoilt tops for the small batch that I had tried to ice and re-iced. Here are some pics from that batch:

I used my current favourite Magnolia Bakery recipe but I reduced the sugar in the icing because it was WAY too sweet and adjusted the milk and vanilla accordingly.

New Vanilla Buttercream Icing ingredients:
1 cup unsalted butter, softened
4 cups icing sugar (eek!)
1/4 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

I made a mix of icing: plain, pink and to the the last third, I added some passionfruit pulp. I don’t know if you can tell from the pics,but the passionfruit pulp made the icing loose some of its consistency and while not quite curdling, it looked like it was about to.

here’s the happy looking plain icing:

and here’s the passionfruited icing:

I could have fixed this by adding more plain icing but then I was diluting the lovely passionfruit flavour so what I did was roll them in dried coconut and it solved the problem most delectably!

Here are some of the normal (ie didn’t get their tops cut off) batch with the passionfruit and coconut icing:

I liked this little guy, he had the passionfruit and coconut icing treatment but also got a little drop of pink buttercream icing as a little hat!