Mom's Birthday Carrot Cake Cupcakes

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Last weekend my mother celebrated her birthday, sort of. Unfortunately she is born on leap day. So I made her favorite, Carrot Cake, but into cupcakes with a cream cheese frosting. I made everything from scratch, from my textbook I use for school, but I had to reduce the recipe to only a fourth of the original. I put fresh grated carrots, walnuts and pumpkin spice instead of all spice into these cupcakes and topped it off with cream cheese frosting and placing chopped walnuts on the sides of the icing. I think these cupcakes turned out pretty amazing and they were really tasty.

Ice Box Cookies

Last week we learned how to create a basic sugar cookie from scratch. As soon as the dough comes out of the freezer they start to thaw fast so we had to learn how to work with it quickly. We dyed half the dough so we could create different patterns. Once they were all cooked and cooled they began to get hard but I placed a piece of bread in the packaging and they softened up nicely. I liked this technique but it took us the entire class (6 hours) to complete these cookies. So I may make smaller batches next time I do this recipe.

Drapery

 

This week in my Advanced Wedding Cake class we practiced the drapery technique (top). We covered each layer in a crumb coat then with our choice of colored rolled fondant over the tiers. The top tier was a more structured drape with attached tassels, which I should have hidden the attachment more with the flowers but I wanted the flowers to be more at an angle. The bottom tier is a more freestyle drapery, where I could change the shape and length if I would like. This technique is mostly used on wedding cakes because of its elegant look and how similar it is to a dress preferably a wedding dress. The other side of the cake (bottom) on the top tier we practiced the ruffled technique, which would look good on any tier on a wedding cake, I also think an ombre effect would look really nice with this technique. And the bottom tier we just learned more piping skills, which I need to practice more.