Title: Baking Baker Street Boredom
Fandom: BBC Sherlock
Length: Twelve cupcakes ;)
Materials: Chocolate cupcakes, strawberry filling, milk chocolate ganache icing, fondant topping
Notes: In 'honour' of my niece's birthday.  *waves hello to prompt from a long way away*  Also for the 'hit the wall' and 'cake' challenges.  Edit:  Hmmm, I told the images to be small, but they don't seem to have listened? Maybe it's something to do with the stylesheet for this community. *puzzled*  Edit2: Yes it is.  You can see the images smaller in the flow of things by using style=mine.


The finished product:


Chocolate cupcakes, strawberry filling (I thought they needed a 'heart'), milk chocolate ganache icing, fondant shell embossed with a raised print of the 221B wallpaper and then painted with a food colour/alcohol mix to make it stand out.  I'm really pleased with the way the size of the pattern's worked out that the cupcakes all sitting together almost look like they're part of a bigger pattern--that's a complete fluke, but kind of marvellous.


Progress shots below, close angles to avoid showing my messy kitchen.  :)  Would I do it the same way next time?  Hell no for a number of reasons.

My first plan was to get hold of a cake lace pattern from a shop that was a close fit to the wallpaper, but no dice, and by that time I was super keen to make it work.  So I mucked around with cutting out a stencil, but that didn't really work.  So first I got a printout of the wallpaper pattern and traced over it with a pencil, so I could transfer it onto...


A square of craft linoleum.  My first thought had been a foodsafe silicone mat, which I've seen before in dollar stores - that might have worked better further on, although it would have been the very devil to cut out.  No guarantees on foodsafety of lino, but... it sounded fine to me for small manufacture.  It was arduous cutting it out, but it was fairly easy to get an accurate cut.


Then my four year old and I baked cupcakes!  He helped me cut the strawberries for the filling, and we cooked them up with a bit of lemon juice so it would be fairly sour to contrast with the sweet icing, and used cornflour to thicken it. I scooped out the cupcake centres with a melon baller and piped it in.


I had some leftover milk chocolate ganache from my four year old's birthday a few weeks ago (it keeps for a month or two in the freezer) and so I warmed it up and iced the cupcakes with that.  Left them to set in the fridge, then used a hot palette knife to sculpt them smooth.  Chocolate ganache is great under fondant, because it's solid from the fridge so you have a firm surface to work on, but then at room temperature while it holds its shape it gives like the middle of a lindt ball, and tastes just like chocolate.  Yum.  :)


Next was the fondant.  My plan, had I managed to get hold of a cake lace mould, was to fill the cutouts with black fondant and then press the white down on top of it, but cake lace requires a mould that can be baked, and when I tried pressing down and scraping out ordinary fondant from my lino mould, it didn't hold the embossed shape well enough--so plain white it was.  I usually use a little vegetable shortening when I'm rolling it out to prevent it from sticking, but this time rice bran oil seemed to work better.  I had to oil it moderately thoroughly to stop them from sticking to the mould, then press down thoroughly with my fingers to get it into the detail, then roll and carefully peel it out.  Cut out a circle, carefully settled it down over the dome, and voila.  This step looks like magic to me.  :)  I always roll my fondant super super thin, under a millimeter if I can, so that it dries and goes crisp like an m&m shell over the meltingly soft ganache underneath--but because of the rice bran oil it didn't do that and the surface still tastes a bit fondanty.  Oh well.


Then came the process - significantly less laborious than the lino, actually - of filling in the embossing with colour.  I used a drop of my super-strong gel food colour mixed with what was supposed to be vodka, but my husband had drunk it all, so ended up being bacardi.  And my kids have wrecked my smallest paintbrush, and my tremor was acting up which it sometimes does for fine detail work like this where there's no pressure (like the lino cut) to help me control it.  But at least with the embossed guide, it was easy enough to fill in the paint in the right spots.  I tried painting the smiley on top of the wallpaper first, but it didn't look very good because the colour was transparent.  Then it occurred to me at 2am that of course I needed to paint the smiley first, and then only paint the wallpaper on for the exposed portions, so I got out of bed and did that on a spare cupcake.  No progress shot of that one, because I was half asleep.


Points of learning for next time (which there always are in this kind of thing).  I wouldn't bother with the embossing if I was keen to colour it as well, it made the painting a bit easier but not enough to be worth the trouble of making the mould, and while it does look cool when you look closely, it didn't make much difference to the final look.  Also, because I needed to oil the icing to get it out again, the fondant hasn't gone crisp--but more importantly, the food colour paint has remained sitting on the surface of the icing and not soaked in and dried.  So when we eat the cupcakes this afternoon, I suspect the food colour will shift and stick to the people trying to eat it.  :/  Oh well, I wasn't planning to get family photographs this week anyway.  I'll edit with an eating shot later today if there's anything particularly impressive.  :)