Hello everyone and Happy Monday!!
This a very belated blog entry! I was actually working on it (uploading all the photos when the debacle with the coffee and the laptop happened, back in March!) but I think it's high time I finally publish it!
On Saint Patrick's Day this year I attended the Intensive Wilton 1 Cake Decorating Course at La Tienda Americana. And I absolutely loved every minute of it!
The course, although it gives a lot of general basics on how to bake a cake, cut it and cover it, mostly deals with the use of the piping bag and different piping tips, to create all sort of amazing decorations solely using buttercream!
Loleta, our teacher is a certified Wilton instructor and an absolute prodigy of the piping bag, the things that woman can do!
On these courses you get a kit with a book, and materials necessary for it, which means a lot of quite awesome Wilton goodies! (I'm not a fan of Wilton cupcake liners, cause they're crap, there I said it, but the rest of the Wilton stuff is awesome!).
And since I spent the whooole day at the course, I didn't have any time to make some St Patrick's cupcakes, so I made them the next day!
I thought that for St Patrick's a must would be a recipe with Guinness, so using the vegan recipe for stout and chocolate cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World, I used Guinness instead of the vegan stout suggested and then used the Bailey's buttercream recipe from Lola's Cupcakes book, except I used a little less icing sugar than recommended, it gets too gritty for my taste otherwise. And since it's St Patrick's, green cupcakes were a must, I went for a mix of the Green Tea cupcakes recipe from the Primrose Bakery and the vegan recipe from VCTOTW!
For the decorations I used sugarpaste/fondant and some awesome stencils I got from Coppergifts (another awesome place to get stencils is Designer Stencils) with some edible sparkly powders (Sugarflair and Wilton). It's a rather simple technique but you get some spectacular results!
Guinness & chocolate cupcake with Bailey's buttercream!
I sent all the cupcakes to the nephews, the liked the green tea ones enough (but they said they sort of tasted too healthy? My sis-in-law loved them though) but they ADORED the Guinness & Bailey's ones, go figure!
Oh, and I forgot to show you my diploma! Course 1 done & bagged! I learnt a lot, had a blast with my fellow students and got some awesome goodies!
Well done, Pili! And no worries about the Paddy's Day post being late. It was worth the wait to get to see all those gorgeous bikkies and yummy cupcakes - and the lovely Celtic designs as the icing toppings. Beautiful! I especially love the Celtic cross and the claddagh ones - for obvious reasons, lol.
ReplyDeleteI'm absolutely certain that everything tasted as delicious as it looked. I love cupcakes (well...over here they're called fairy cakes most of the time) and I love bikkies too, so it'd be a very tough decision which ones I'd enjoy more. Probably ALL of them, lol.
Although I occasionally do have and enjoy a Guinness (well...a half a pint) and it does give me a nice, mellow buzz, it's a bit too heavy for me, so I think I'd go for the Bailey's (which I love, love, love!).
Well done, you, for getting your Wilton diploma, too! Bet it was fun 'studying' for the final exam, lol.
Thanks for sharing, Pili, and, even though it's a wee bit late, may I take this time to wish you Beannacht Lá Fhéile Pádraig, mo chara.
Slan go foill,
June
Wowee these are amazing! Those cakes are works of art. I love the cake with the little pink flowers on, it's beautiful x
ReplyDeleteThese look absolutely amazing Pili!!
ReplyDeleteThose cupcakes sound so yummy and look so good. I think the Green tea flavor is a good one for me. Too cute. Glad to see you caching up after that terrible laptop disaster.
ReplyDeleteGorgeous cupcakes. There lovely all year round. Anything with an Irish or Celtic theme is fine by me. Great idea of using guinness and bailyes in thc actual recepies.
ReplyDeletePili! Those cupcakes are amazing! Congrats on the cupcake diploma! :)
ReplyDelete