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!
