Bulldog Calc-cakes
Sorry for my long absence. It looks like my last post was in March! I didn’t even post my Pi”e” Day cupcakes. We had a bit of an issue with our hosting service and so things piled up a bit and I never caught up. You might see a better late then never Pi”e” Day post soon as well.
Anyway, it is about that time of the year – Yep, that’s right… time to make cupcakes for Josh’s calculus class. The AP exam was last week and I just got around to it. I think I have done this for the past few years (not always around AP time though). Once I made them these e^x cupcakes right around when they were learning about the derivative of e^x. Then one of Josh’s students created this cool image of “the rate of tummy expansion.” This time, I wanted to do something that had to do with their school colors and mascot. So, I attempted to make little bulldog paw print toppers. Of course I started with a chocolate cupcake. I usually like to put chocolate chunks inside, but since I didn’t have any I used some white chocolate chips.
I always use my siganture cream cheese icing. I really like this much better than buttercream. For the toppers I toyed around with using fondant, but I didn’t want to use the pre-made fondant because it just doesn’t taste very good. I had one failed attempt at making some marshmallow fondant with this recipe here that my friend Aaron shared with me some time ago. I think my marshmallows may have been too old… Oh well. I will try that again at some point. So, I went back to one of my orginal ideas which was to use Wilton Candy Melts kind of like you would with cookie dough and cut out little circles. The school colors are red and blue. So, first I melted some red candy melts and spread the melted candy on a parchment-lined cookie sheet.
I placed this in the fridge for about 5 minutes and then took it out and used a round cookie cutter to cut all my little circles.
I had debated on whether I should use candy melts for the actual paw print. I thought I would and I even picked up these Wilton Candy Decorating Pens, but in the end I thought that royal icing might work a little better. I might not have got the pens to the right workable consistency though. I will beed to try them again. So, I made a batch of royal icing and tinted it blue using this recipe. I wasn’t thinking, and so I made a whole batch – Anybody need any royal icing? :-) I then went to work on trying to get the paw prints on the red circles.
I was pretty happy with the way these came out. I was trying to get them so that they didn’t have those little peaks where I lifted up the piping bag, but as you can see I wasn’t all that successful. I read somewhere that this might be because my icing was still too thick. I didn’t have the same problem when I made my cupcake cookies, but I was filling in a much larger area. Anyway, it wasn’t too big of a deal. Only thing left to do was assemble the cupcakes – a dollop of cream cheese icing and one Bulldog topper.
I wasn’t sure if the color from the candy melts was going to run or anything. So, I decided after putting the toppers on the first half to leave the second half iced, but without the topper. Josh assembled the rest when he got to school.
It looks like his class enjoyed them! Congrats on finishing up a year of calculus! Go Bulldogs!
Thanks so much for the delicious (and school-spirited) cupcakes! Loved ‘em!
Joshua – Thanks for the comment! They were really fun to make. I am glad you enjoyed them! I hope you enjoy the last few weeks of school and graduation! Best of luck! Loved you in Indoles!