A Kiss From The Ethereal Fairy

Growing up in an asian household, fairycakes never made it as one of the birthday party items. If anything, cupcakes became a deadly fascination only after I watched 'Sex And The City'. The one where Miranda and Carrie were having yet another tete-a-tete over a large fuschia frosted cupcake each. I have since dreamed of this pink cupcake endlessly. I may not like the sickeningly sweet fuschia frosting but I would like to have one in my hand, smearing my lips just a little as I take a gigantic bite off one.

So when I finally got Nigella's 'How To Be A Domestic Goddess' book, her Fairycakes was earmarked almost immediately when I leafed through it. And since I have a little get together tomorrow, I made a batch of these today.

What I love most of this recipe is that it makes exactly 12 large cupcakes without excess leftovers. What I disliked was that it called for Royal Icing which is not sold in Singapore. I surfed quite a few sites before 'inventing' this frosting myself. Whilst I will not repeat Nigella's recipe for the basic cupcake (you can get it off her website anyway), I will list the recipe for the self invented icing.

Chaos' Instant Icing for Fairycakes
30ml unsalted butter
250gm Icing sugar Dash of Good Vanilla Essence
3-4 Tbsps of Cold Milk

- Melt unsalted butter over a boiling water bath, removing when melted
- Add vanilla essence & unsifted icing sugar. Whisk till mixed
- Whisk like the wind over heat
- It will be lumpy but as you whisk over very gentle heat, the butter starts to get runny, incorporating the icing sugar well. This is when you start to drizzle the milk in, aiming for a dripping consistency (i.e. be able to drip from a spoon onto each cupcake)
- Remove from heat and whisk till it is bubble-less and smooth.
- Divide the icing sugar into batches, dependant on the number of colours you wish to create. I used 2 gel paste colours, white and red (trying for fuschia).
- Take a dollop of coloured icing and drip it into each cupcake.
- The batch made will sufficiently ice 12 cupcakes.

Hint: I didn't really want to lop the tops of the cupcakes off (truthfully? I can't bear to throw away lopped cupcake tops), so I used large muffin cases and molds when baking the cakes. This ensured that my cupcake was fairly well spread and minimal rising occurred. I still had cute round little mounds but nothing that required lopping of any kind.

After icing the cakes, I would place each into a small wide rimmed bowl, swirl it firmly a couple of times and voila! The icing would be well spread around the sides (remembering that each cupcake still had mounds and thus more icing is required along the edges of the cupcakes) after such swirls.

I misplaced my wafer roses and sugar daisies so I used whole lavender sugar roses, attached with sugar leaves. These are the same sugar flowers that one would use when decorating a whole cake or even a wedding cake.
Yes... I realise no one would wanna risk losing a tooth or two eating into these decorations but I just can't resist the end result.

Tell me if you think it was worth putting these over-the-top flowers on!