Ask me to bake a cake and I can whip up something in a snap. Ask me to decorate that cake, to make it cute and whimsical, and I start to panic. As much as I love a bit of kitsch in the kitchen, I’m a disaster at making food fun. My smiley face pancakes will make you cry. Swan napkins? Complete ugly ducklings. Yet, somehow I’ve managed to recreate many of the adorable cupcakes featured in Karen Tack’s and Alan Richardson’s Hello Cupcake (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008) and What’s New, Cupcake? (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010).
Similar to its predecessor, What’s New, Cupcake? offers an assortment of clever but easy cupcake designs. Along with the ducks pictured on its cover, it provides steps for constructing dogs, squirrels, skunks, moose, flamingos, crocodiles, hippos, polar bears and walruses. Animals not your favorite? How about chrysanthemums, roses, apples, golf greens, badminton shuttlecocks, karaoke microphones and ants on a picnic? Follow Tack’s and Richardson’s concise instructions and you can craft any of these.
Since I’m a sucker for Halloween, I first tried jack-o-lanterns. Smart move as these proved to be among the easiest cupcakes in the book. Simply tint store-bought vanilla frosting with orange food coloring and cocoa powder and pipe the colored frosting in rows on top of the cupcakes. Soften Tootsie Rolls and yellow Starbursts in the microwave, roll them out and cut them into eyes, noses and mouths. Place the cut outs on each frosted cupcake. Shove a pretzel twist into space above the eyes and you’ve got a stem and a finished jack-o-lantern.
Elaborate items, such as stuffed turkeys and blow-up lawn santas, are unquestionably time consuming. However, thanks to clear steps, illustrations and photographs in What’s New, Cupcake?, they aren’t all that difficult. As the cover of the first book states, these are “irresistibly playful creations that anyone can make.” Believe me, if I can turn a plain cupcake into an angry rat or plump, playful ghost, you can, too.
While I adore the creativity of these cupcakes, I don’t love the reliance upon store-bought frostings. In the case of “hound dogs” I ended up substituting homemade chocolate ganache for the required canned chocolate icing. The resulting hound dog looked the same but tasted fresher and more chocolaty than the ones slathered in commercially-produced frosting. Nonetheless, store-bought is much simpler and can be more consistent than homemade so, unless you have the extra time and a fool-proof recipe, stick with the requirements in What’s New, Cupcake?. You’re bound to create cute and clever cupcakes and have some fun in the kitchen, too.