Bake & Decorate Cupcakes

26 Sep 09

2 months back, I made Pink cupcakes for Andy's baby full moon and shared the photos with a few of my colleagues. Our marketing manager, Wendy, didn't believe that I made those. Subsequently, I baked and let her tested my cupcakes and she just loved it.

One day, after our meeting, Wendy told me "Hei, we are going to have this concept store launching. Do you want to make cupcake for us?". It was an unexpected question and after a few Q&As, I decided to take up the challenge. Then, Wendy told our GM about it and he said "Why not? Its passion from our own staff." Wah lau ... that statement added on so much pressure on me.

Lots of things and ideas came to my mind. I started thinking, planning and browsing through Internets on cupcakes and decorations. The problem with me was I can bake yummy cupcakes but I couldn't make pretty cupcakes. And this company's event was on "Decorate your own cupcakes". Then, I started to get worry. I spent lots of late hours to do research and cupcake decorating classes.

Wendy asked me "How do you charge?". I've never done this as business, I only bake for family and friends. And how could I charge my company when I'm drawing salary from it? I decided to claim based on bills and requested for 2 things ... Cupcake decorating class and cake tray.

I signed up for ICCA's Bake & Decorate Cupcakes hands-on class at RM120. The class covered some basic cupcakes decoration techniques.

We learned how to bake vanilla cupcake. Honestly, I wasn't there to learn this but to ask questions regarding cake baking ie why cake rose and sink, why cake crack, what's the difference between Buttercup and Anchor butter, sensitivity of ingredients and how they react, etc. I was happy that I got the answers for most of my questions.

Vanilla butter cream icing using Krimwell margarine. Personally, I would prefer the pink icing to be lighter in colour.

Cutting off the dome effect on top of cupcake for ease of decorating.

Swirl and sprinkles using Tip 1M.

Rosettes (Tip 16) and leaves (Tip 352).

Sunflower using Tip 352 and chocolate chunks.

Flower power and star-filled centres using Tip 3 for outline and Tip 16 for stars.

Star border (Tip 16) and name (Tip 3) in centre.

The instructor decided to teach us additional tips ... Basket using Tip 16

and Zig Zag using Tip 16 too.

I like Tip 16, there's so much you can do with it.


These are the cupcakes that I took home to show off to my family.

I was more confident after the cupcake decorating class.