First birthday cupcakes

One of the babies at play group turned one this week, so naturally he needed a cake. I still had plenty of purple and green fondant left over from hubby's welcome home cake, and I wanted to trial run an idea for another birthday I am doing cupcakes for this month, so that's how these lovely cakes were created.

I kneaded some CMC into the fondant before cutting out the shapes, to help them dry out quicker. I did the cutouts and let them dry overnight, then glued them together with sugar flower glue and let that dry overnight before putting them on the cupcakes.

The cakes themselves were the recipe from the Planet Cake book. Normally I would use the Crabapple recipe, but it makes 24 cakes and I didn't want to make that many. The Planet Cake recipe made 12, which was a much more managable number. However, I didn't have any lemons so I had to leave out the lemon zest. The frosting is the Crabapple Cupcake Bakery's vanilla buttercream, but I made a half quantity (and still had heaps left).

I love this cupcake recipe. It's really easy, and the cakes had a lovely dome on top, which made the soft-serve frosting effect really easy to achieve. They tasted pretty good too, as did the frosting. And I loved how the number stars turned out - they reminded me of Toy Story. Though I'm seriously considering switching to vanilla extract instead of vanilla essence - I found these tasted a tad chemical. I'm also thinking of trying an Italian meringue buttercream in future, because the frosting is rather gritty.