Gloverly Cupcakes

At the moment I’m in the process of moving house. This means that we don’t have any internet yet. I’m therefore slightly restricted with what I can blog about at the moment – I can only post things which I’ve taken photos of on my phone. I was planning on writing my next one on the red velvet wedding cake which I made several weeks ago for one of my best friends, Nic. However, the best photos of it aren’t on my phone so instead here are the cupcakes that I also made for the wedding.

The cake was going to be the desert so when I found out that one of the bridesmaids, Ali, was gluten-free I said I’d make a mini batch of gluten-free red velvet cupcakes so that she wouldn’t miss out. I’ve made gluten-free cupcakes before but never red velvet so I consulted with Becky since she regularly bakes gluten-free goodies for her running club. She told me that she found that bicarb doesn’t seem to react well with gluten-free flour so I decided to use the same recipe as I did for the main cake (to follow next week once I have internet!) but substituted the plain flour for gluten-free flour and the bicarb for gluten-free baking powder.

I wanted them to look pretty as well, so I decided that I would bake the cupcakes in small white buckets and decorate them to look like hydrangeas, to go with some of the wedding flowers. The looked really effective when they were finished and I would definitely make them again, probably in different colours.
I made the hydrangea petals out of sugar florist paste, using a hydrangea petal cutter and veiner set. After I’d cut them out and veined them, I lightly brushed the edges with blue petal dust and placed them in a foam petal former so that the petals curved upwards. Using a fine paintbrush I put a dot of edible glue in the middle of each and then put 4 small edible pearls into each one.