Making Cupcakes: Practice Makes Perfect

September 17, 2012

Making Cupcakes: Practice Makes Perfect

You know what they say. "Practice makes perfect." Okay, they're not perfect but the results are good enough for me! :) So here is the thing: I'm not really a baker. These days I'm sort of turning into a hobby baker though. Two years ago, I haven't even started to make cupcakes. I didn't make my first cupcake until October of 2010. Before then, I never baked a single cupcake in my life! In fact, I barely ever ate cupcakes in my life. Why? I didn't like them. They were all too sweet. My parents did not feed us food like that and every time I craved for something sweet, it was often a chocolate brownie or something similar. I never had the urge to make cupcakes. Until around two years ago.

Like many new parents, I felt like I needed to bake more. I loved cooking and I did it often. I was never really into baking. I also never cared about presentation. All that mattered to me was the taste of it :) Then I noticed parents sharing pictures of sweet treats on Twitter and I soon discovered that there were a lot of talented bakers out there. I was really impressed by their work and secretly wanted to be like them. Shhhh! :) I started to realize how artistic cake making could be. I knew one day my 3 1/2 year would be eating cake and cupcakes at parties and I wanted his first one to be from me and homemade.

I think I have come a long way since the day I made my first cupcakes. Now that I look back, I just laugh. The day I made my first cupcakes, I remembered I tried to pipe icing on those cupcakes but failed miserably. I had no idea how to connect the piping tip to the bag. I ended up just squeezing it through a hole and it got super messy! Lol. Also, I wanted red icing but all I could make was pink.

October 22, 2010 - my 1st homemade cupcake.

My failed attempt at a 2 color tone inside.

I thought it would be fun to share a post and give you an idea of how my cupcakes have evolved and improved over the past two years. I actually got a hang of it on cupcake attempt #3 I think. Things were going well until I started a new recipe and had to learn another thing or two. I'm learning a great deal just through trial and error and of course, research :)

December 19, 2010 - 2nd cupcake attempt

At least I got the coloring right this time. Icing still the pits!

January 1, 2011 - my 3rd attempt - SUCCESS!

February 2, 2011

August 21, 2011 - icing attempt failed on red velvet cupcakes.

August 25, 2011

November 19, 2011

December 24, 2011

February 13, 2012 - red velvet cupcakes with successful icing :)

March 1, 2012

April 8, 2012

And here are my latest cupcakes! I made them last week for the family party for my niece's 8th birthday. I wanted to have fun with these ones. I was getting a bit bored of the standard frilled frosting look so I tried a a couple of different frosting techniques using some of my other piping tips. I have many different piping tips but I only use a handful of them since I still don't know what to do with the others. Lol. I may look like I know what I'm doing but I still have tons to learn :)