Cupcake Wars!

Today was day 6 of my Fundamentals class. The main thing that we did today in class was a version of the Cupcake Wars on Food Network. We had three and a half hours to produce three dozen cupcakes with icing and a chocolate piped butterfly on top. We had groups of three and it went pretty well. My group made a red velvet cupcake with cream cheese icing and a pink butterfly on top. We started with the cake since it needed time to bake and then cool. We used the recipe below:                                            RED VELVET CAKE

INGREDIENT	LB.	OZ.
CAKE FLOUR	6	2
SUGAR	6	9
BAKING SODA	0	1.75
SALT	0	2
COCOA POWDER	0	1
OIL	7	3
BUTTERMILK	5	0
EGGS	2	2
RED FOOD COLORING	0	10
VINEGAR	0	1.75
VANILLA	0	2

 You take these ingredients and start with mixing the oil and sugar then add in the eggs. After that is incorporated, you add in the dry ingredients and then the liquids. Now this recipe above will make a lot of cupcakes so we had to convert it to make sure that it made only three dozen by making sure that each cupcake was 2 oz.

Then we went on to the icing. We made a simple mixture of butter, cream cheese and powdered sugar but you could easily just buy some cream cheese icing. 

To make the chocolate butterflies, we used an image and placed it under a piece of parchment paper and then took a piping bag and traced over the image. When dried they will become hard but they are extremely fragile so you have to be very careful with these. A lot of other groups filled in the wings and this would make the butterflies a little stronger.

When the cupcakes were cool we piped a rosette of icing on the cupcake and placed the butterfly on top. This is what our end result looked like: