Twin Peaks Cake 2 – Blue Rose Cupcakes

Still no poetry coming, and I’m finding it hard to focus on the rewrite of The Ardenna Crossing at the minute, but I had another chance to get creative in the kitchen this weekend. A good friend of mine in the Twin Peaks fan community was celebrating his birthday up in Manchester so I decided to rustle up some cupcakes to mark the occasion.

I used the chocolate cupcake recipe from the Hummingbird Bakery book (my go to book for cupcake recipes). There are some rally good recipes in there if you get the chance to pick up a copy. It’s not just cupcakes either; there are cakes, pies and other things too.

The mixture was supposed to make enough for 12, but I only managed to get 8 out of it. I don’t know if 12 refers to the smaller cases but I used bigger ones and I had to scrape and scrape just to get 8!

After the basics were done, I transplanted myself and my precious baked cargo to Manchester, with a playlist of Leftfield, REM, Ice Cube and Vivaldi accompanying me in the car.

Once settled into my bijou suite at the Travelodge in Salford Quays, I set to work on the decorations. I must say at this point that I cheated somewhat and bought the icing ready made. making icing is really a job that I loathe. It just ends up with icing sugar everywhere, so I bought some Cadbury’s icing, even though I saw it had palm oil in it which I know makes me evil. The great God, convenience, was driving my bus! Atop the chocolate icing were to be some blue roses, made from another pack of (shame) ready made icing.

To make roses, first you separate out five equally sized pieces of icing and roll them into balls.

Then you flatten each one out into a petal shape, making the top as thin as you can.

Then you roll the first one like a tube and wrap the others around it until you have a shape like this one. I did something similar on my wedding cake seven years ago (not blue, though). There are great YouTube guides on how to do this better than me if you want to try it.