Pink Heart Cupcakes
Pink Heart Cupcakes
Wow! I almost feel like I’m supporting breast cancer research by making so many pink and white cupcakes. Hmmmm… this could be an exciting new opportunity for the future, but until then let’s just bask in the glory of pink heart cupcakes! Friendly, pretty, tasty and basically just another way to decorate a cupcake with thick fondant icing!
Actually feel like a bit of a “pro” after icing so many cupcakes! The hardest part about making these cupcakes has got to be the making of the heart! As I was not fortunate to have small heart-shaped cookie cutter handy, I had to make do with cutting them out myself using my imagination and a knife! I know! Scary combination! But it all turned out well!
Pink Heart Cupcakes
Ingredients:
Cupcakes: 225g unsalted butter softened, ¾ cup caster sugar, 1 ¼ cup self-raising flour, 1 tsp baking powder, 4 eggs, 1 tsp vanilla essence.
Icing: ½ cup raw sugar, ½ cup warm water, 500g ready-made white fondant icing, red food colouring
Steps: Preheat the oven to 175 degrees Celsius. Grease/Line 15 paper cases in muffin tins. To make the cupcakes: Combine the butter and sugar and beat together using electric beaters until pale and creamy. Add the flour, baking powder, eggs and vanilla essence, then beat to combine until smooth and pale. Ensure you scrape the edges between beating to ensure the mixture is mixed thoroughly.
Spoon the batter into the cases and bake for 15-20 minutes or until golden and a skewer inserted into the centre of the cupcake comes out clean. Cool in tins for 5 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool.
To ice the cupcakes: dust the work surface well with sifted icing sugar. (Keep extra icing sugar on hand, as you will need to re-dust the work area intermittently) Knead the icing until smooth. Take 25g of the icing, knead until soft then use a small heart cookie cutter to cut out heart shapes. Meanwhile, with the remainder of the icing, add 4 drops of red food colouring and knead until a smooth even pink colour is produced. Roll out the pink icing with a rolling pin, and form balls of about 2.5cm diameter then roll out with a rolling pin to make circles with a thickness of 4mm. To make the syrup: combine ½ cup of raw sugar with ½ cup warm water. Brush the syrup onto the top of the cooled cupcake and then drape the rolled out pink icing onto the cake and smooth down. Trim excess icing with a sharp knife. Stick the white hearts of icing onto the pink icing using a small amount of syrup.
Makes 15
