Planet Cake by Paris Cutler

This book contains enough fondant-covered awesomeness to drive any young child delirious with excitement. You can teach yourself how to make a giant thong (ahem, flip flop), a handbag and a make up box all out of cake and fondant. So it of course makes perfect sense that I would use this book to make the most mundane, ordinary and un-exciting bake of all; plain vanilla cupcakes. If time and money (fondant is expensive, yo) were on my side (and er... an actual occasion to bake for), I would have made one of the many fabulous cakes showcased in this book. Instead, I have made a feeble attempt to redeem myself by frosting the cupcakes in a way not unlike the rainbow paddlepops of your childhood

 #throwback.......Saturday.
To be honest, the resemblance was, much like the addition of Chemical X to sugar, spice and everything nice, merely a happy accident. But it works and the positive reactions to them on social media made me feel a little less guilty for choosing such a plain recipe to blog.



Besides from the cakes, this book provides many useful tips on decorating with fondant, as well as some other basic cake and frosting recipes; I've used the white chocolate mudcake recipe from here before and it is diviiiiine.
As for the cupcakes themselves, they're a fairly ordinary base cupcake and to be honest, the preparation felt a little more complicated than the usual vanilla cake recipe I use (maybe it was all the lemon zest grating? who knows...), so I would probably stick to that in the future. However I found the addition of lemon zest added a complementary taste and these paired well with the sweetness of buttercream as the cakes themselves aren't overly sweet; I'm sure I'm not alone in my fear of people politely wiping off excess buttercream off a cupcake because it's too sweet. It ruins the whole experience of the cupcake, damnnit!



Anywho, here's the cake recipe. I didn't take many progress pics of the icing, so if you want to recreate it, simply Google 'rainbow frosting tutorial' or something similar. Essentially, it just involved four coloured icings put into the same piping bag, keeping each colour as separate as possible until the actual piping bit happened. Yeah, just Google it........




Vanilla Cupcakes
Adapted from Planet Cake by Paris Cutler

Ingredients
175g soft butter
3/4 cup caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp lemon zest, grated
2 eggs
260g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
200mL milk

Method
Preheat the oven to 180 degrees and line a 12 hole muffin pan with patty cases.

Beat the butter, sugar, vanilla and lemon zest until light and fluffy. Then add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition to fully combine.

Sift the flour and baking powder together. Fold half the flour into the mixture, and then half the milk. Repeat. 

Divide the batter equally among the patty cases (depending on the sizes of your patty cases, you may well have excess batter, so have some extra patty cases prepared).

Bake for 15 - 20 minutes, or until a skewer inserted into the centre of each cupcake comes out clean. Allow to cool in the muffin pan for a few minutes, before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely. Ice and decorate as desired. 

Cutler, P, 2009, Planet Cake, Murdoch Books Australia, Millers Point.