Sunflower Cupcakes

The Art.

    I've always loved crafts and baking, even when I was a little kid. Fortunately, my mom was really good at coming up with easy projects for me to work on. One year for my birthday, she helped me make these cute sunflower cupcakes to give to my classmates, along with little sunflower seedlings we had started in dixie cups. This made me the most popular 4th grader in school for at least a few days and life was good. I had forgotten all about my elementary school fame until this summer, when I started some sunflower seeds on my back porch. I thought I would share the recipe with you, since we all can use something quick and easy in the summertime. 

    I also want to take this opportunity to encourage everyone to plant sunflowers, not only because they're pretty, but also because I've discovered that wild canaries love to eat the seeds! I had no idea we had such brightly colored birds here, and now I get to watch them while I eat my breakfast.

 

 The Science.

    One of the difficulties of cake decorating in the summer is that the heat can make icing decorations melt. In the past I've solved this by putting my cakes in the freezer before I took them anywhere, but it can be difficult to time things just right so you're not stuck trying to cut a frozen cake. More recently, I decided to alter my buttercream icing recipe so that it would tolerate higher temperatures. My standard buttercream recipe has equal parts of butter and shortening. While butter has a wonderful flavor, it has a very small working temperature range. At cool temperatures it is too hard to pipe, and it becomes drippy and greasy when it's warm. Shortening, on the other hand, has a much broader temperature range in which is it workable, and has a much higher melting point than butter [1,2]. To make my summertime buttercream, I simply increased the shortening:butter ratio in my icing from 1:1 to 3:1. This way, my icing will still have a buttery flavor, but it will withstand the summer heat.

The Recipe.

Make one batch of chocolate cupcakes, recipe here.

Summertime Buttercream Icing:

1/2 cup salted butter, room temperature
1 1/2  cups vegetable shortening
5-7 cups powdered sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla

    In large bowl, beat together butter and shortening on medium speed until fluffy. Beat in powdered sugar, one cup at a time. Add sugar until icing makes stiff, jagged peaks. Beat in vanilla. If icing tastes too sugary or grainy, add a couple tablespoons of milk. Use immediately or store in an airtight container for up to two weeks. Makes enough icing for one 9" round cake or 24 cupcakes.

                                                                                                          Decorating:

    Dye one third of the icing green, and the remaining icing yellow. I used Wilton Icing Colors golden yellow and a little bit of orange to make my icing a sunflower yellow. Place each batch of icing in its own zippered sandwich bag, and seal the top. Snip one of the bottom corners off of the bags to create a piping bag. (Be careful not to snip off too much! A hole approximately 1/2in. is about right.) Cover each cupcake with a thin smear of green icing. Then, use your piping bag to pipe leaves onto the cupcakes. You can vary the size and number of the leaves to make it interesting.

     Using the yellow icing, begin piping petals in a ring around the edge of the cupcake. For these cupcakes, I piped a second ring of smaller petals inside the first set of petals to add dimension. Another fun idea you may want to try is striping your piping bag with orange dye, so your petals have pretty orange streaks.

    Finally, fill the center of the cupcake with mini chocolate chips to look like sunflower seeds. To display these cupcakes, I took an idea from one of my favorite decorating books, What's New, Cupcake?, and used green Twizzlers Rainbow liquorice to make stems for the sunflowers.

    Cupcakes can be stored at room temperature for a couple days, or placed in the fridge or freezer for longer storage.

1. American Baking Essentials Course 201. "Butter, Shortening, and Oils: The Fats We Bake With." The Prepared Pantry, 2005.
2. O Chef, "Turning the Heat up on Crisco (and Lard)." http://www.ochef.com/1157.htm