Operation Pink - The result

Still upset with the result of these cupcakes, I'm heading to my friend's A house. Thankfully for this Project, I'm not alone. I'm working together with my very good friends A and L, both are experienced in the kitchen :) (In fact, L is a pro chef) hehehe - so I'm in VERY good hands.

Right from when I arrive, still fuming from the cupcake's far from perfect appearance, my two pals knew just how to make me feel better :) "It's ok, we can cover it with buttercream and it won't show" "Hey the cupcake tastes good!" "It's actually a good thing! More place for the sweet stuff!" :D (Love ya gals!) :)

So we made cream cheese frosting to cover up the cupcakes and worked the fondant as best as we can (The fondant is hard to work with too - it's very soft and stretchable - very difficult to work with compared to the ones I used in US) and decorate it as girly as we can to please Pink.

And I think we did a fine job given all the circumstances :) Here's what we did with the 26 cupcakes:

Not bad right??? And the birthday gal, Pink, love our surprise. Heh heh. She was squealing especially when she saw the Hello Kitty cupcakes (Yes, she's a fan) and almost didn't want to eat it. My friend L actually had to smear the kitty face so that we have an excuse to feed her a deformed kitty :D... hahaha... and Pink really like the taste - she said it's the best tasting cupcake (Aww shucks, she's just too nice ;) Here's a close up of the cupcakes:

Special thanks to my awesome buddies A and L, couldn't have done it without you! :)

So all the headaches and the drama and the stress are worth it - once we see how happy Pink is with the surprise and the cupcakes ;)

Cake Playing with Project Pink :P

I guess I can't stay quiet for too long :)

My friend Pink (Yes, she's a pink lover to the max - we often call her Pink for real ;) is having a birthday. My friends and I decided that we want to do something special this year and want to throw her a surprise party. During preparations, it was decided that I'm in charge of the cake (wonder why? ;)

Well, it's not exactly smooth sailing. Haha. From the very beginning, there's clashes to what to do with the cake itself. (i.e: Cake/cupcakes? How big? How many? What flavors? Colors? How to decorate? What liners to use? And sooo on) Since the project involves a lot of people, I had to find something agreeable to the people involved - and it just ain't easy trying to please everybody... hahaha... (I can laugh about it now ;)

Then there's the marshmallow problem. We wanted to decorate using fondant, and we wanted to make our own fondant using marshmallows. WHO KNEW that it's very very very difficult trying to locate marshmallow in Jakarta? (Oh how I miss walking to Safeway and being able to grab mashmallows in different sizes right from the baking aisle *bawl*) We went to numerous supermarkets and left empty handed. All they have is the marshmallow with fillings inside (such as jelly or other sweet stuff) and that can't be used for making fondant. Grrr....

The day before the big day, I got sick. I woke up and my whole body aches, my throat really hurts, and I have no energy. (To prove how sick I was: I have no appetite. All I can eat was half a bread roll -_-') Which was weird, because before I sleep I was really fine. I ended up spending the day sleeping and not doing anything productive (Well I did went to the supermarket still trying to find marshmallow - to no avail). Thankfully later that night, my friend located a baking specialty store and found ready to use fondant that taste fine *phew*

The morning of the big day, I woke up early. Feeling a lot better, I start preparing the ingredients to bake the cupcakes for Pink. I was happy too - brand new kitchen, clean new oven, there's a maid to help clean up the mess I'm making. Well that changed after 1 hour.

The first batch of the cupcakes is about to be done. The kitchen smelled nice, peeking into the oven door, you can see the cupcakes getting golden colored, all nice and poufy - cupcake like. THEN, once you take it out of the oven, IT SHRUNK. Like this!

My brand new oven is so temperamental. It kept getting hotter, *because the heat source is real flaming fire and not just heated wire like normal US oven* and I had to deal with 2 fire sources, from top and bottom and trying to figure out what is the best balance to properly bake the cupcakes. Luckily, I had bought enough ingredients to make more batches. This is what I ended up with, after many trials:

Frustrating. And, because I had to leave to my friend's house to start decorating, this is what I ended up bringing:

Deflated cupcakes. *Sigh*. These are the best ones I could collect. They taste ok, like ones I use to make.

So. Not. Happy.