Holiday Cupcakes

I baked red velvet cupcakes for Christmas using the same recipes as the ones used in the SF Giants cake, except I didn't use any food coloring in the cream cheese frosting.  Since I wanted to make the cupcakes Christmas-themed, I used only red and green colored cupcake baking cups.

Before putting the decorations on top of the cupcakes, I piped the cream cheese frosting, using the star-tip, onto the cupakes.  For the bunny cupcake, I melted some Hershey's chocolate and placed the melted chocolate into a silicone mold of the bunny head.  To melt the chocolate, I boiled water and then put a glass boil on top of the pot.  When melting the chocolate, I made sure that the glass bowl did not touch the boiling water.  In order to make the chocolate cool faster, I simply stuck the chocolate in the silicon molds in the refrigerator.  I found that working with milk chocolate is much easier than white chocolate. For the santa hat, stocking, and wreath cupcakes, I simply placed a tip on the tops of some red, white, and green store-bought tube decorating icing.
What I hope to accomplish next is to continue to increase my ability to decorate cupcakes, since they require many more, smaller decorations.

Total Estimated Time: 4.5 hours.
Total Time Logged: 6.5 hours.

Please comment below on anything that you think I did well on, or what I could do to make the decorations better! Thank you for the comments, and have a Happy New Year!

SF Giants

I baked a red velvet cake and decorated the cake with a San Francisco Giants theme as the first part of my Capstone Project.

Red Velvet Cake recipe: http://divascancook.com/the-best-red-velvet-cake-recipe-easy-homemade-moist-with-southern-flair/

Cream Cheese Frosting recipe: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/cream-cheese-frosting-ii/

I reduced the sugar of both the red velvet cake and the cream cheese frosting from 2 cups to 1 and 2/3 cups of sugar for each.  Even though I cut the sugar, the cake and the frosting were still sweet.  While I couldn't necessarily taste-test the cake batter to check the sweetness, I did taste-test the icing while making it to make sure it wasn't too sweet, washing my hands after every taste test.  The reason why I cut the sugar is because I don't particularly care for store-bought cakes simply because they are extremely sweet.

I took my own take on a design that I found: http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/736x/e1/b2/2b/e1b22b9dc765ae9eac409f3b54fa15e3.jpg

For the baseball, I printed out the SF Giants insignia onto a piece of paper.  I needed the design to be backwards, so I redrew the design onto another sheet of paper.  After doing so, I placed the design underneath a sheet of wax paper to pipe the design onto.  The reason I did the design backwards was so that when I flipped the design back over, the insignia would appear the right way instead of mirrored.  I used white chocolate and black gel, melting and dying the white chocolate onto a sheet of wax paper and then placing the design into the freezer for about 10-15 minutes after each additional layer was added (first the black gel, then the orange chocolate, and finally the white chocolate).

Estimated total time: 2 hours.
Total Time Logged: 2 hours.

*I found working with white chocolate very difficult: the chocolate would harden very quickly before I had the chance to really put the chocolate into a piping bag and pipe the design. Any suggestions or tips on how to work with white chocolate?
Therefore, a task I hope to accomplish is to discover other methods to decorate a cake, such as using Colored Chocolate Melts to make the decoration instead of white chocolate.

Feel free to comment on how I can do better on the designs, what I did well on, what I can improve on, and more!

My cake: