Ballerina Cupcake

Last night, I baked lemon cupcakes with lemon frosting and buttercream toppers.  The recipe I used for the lemon cupcakes and lemon frosting was: http://www.crazyforcrust.com/2014/03/perfect-triple-lemon-cupcakes/ but I didn't want to use the lemon curd, so the cupcakes were "double lemon" instead of "triple lemon cupcakes."  I used the star tip when piping the frosting and a smaller size star tip to make the tutu look as if it was made of tulle.  I used this recipe for the buttercream toppers: http://www.craftymorning.com/easy-snowflake-cupcakes-diy-toppers/ and this template in order to make the toppers look like ballerina tutus: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/ae/8e/b9/ae8eb9df463fde74707d4b7e7192a680.jpg.  I simply used a little bit of red food coloring to make the buttercream toppers pink. I then piped the buttercream frosting on to a piece of wax paper on a tray with templates of the tutu that I printed and placed under the wax paper.  Unlike the SF Giants cake, I didn't have to make sure that the template was backwards before piping the design since the tutu is pretty symmetrical.  I used a star tip when the frosting on top of the cake once again because I feel that the star tip is best at adding ridges to the frosting.  I also used a star tip when piping the tutu, but this star tip was much smaller so that I could be more exact.  One of the major problems I had when piping the tutu was that buttercream melts extremely quickly, so the first few tutus came out extremely well, with the ridges appearing, but after a while, the buttercream started melting in the bag because of the warmness of my hand and the ridges no longer appeared.  As a result, I had to continually refill the bag while dumping out any excess buttercream that became overheated.  In addition, I discovered that I had to transfer the tutus onto the cupcakes quite quickly so that the heat from my hand wouldn't melt the tutu before I was able to place it onto the cupcake.

My next goal is to try to make something other than cupcakes to see if I can decorate those too and to expand my pastry making knowledge and skills.

Total Estimated Time: 2 hours
Total Time Logged: 16.5 hours