Flavouring and a reaction

A touch late - but in the spirit of my blog it's because we spent most of yesterday in the hospital with our Daughter who thought it was nice when her little sister shared her milk with her so she took a sip, even after being told that it wasn't safe.  Hopefully she learned a lesson, because that was not a fun day.  I had just run out the door 5 minutes late for my Zumba class and not even 2 minutes down the road my husband calls me saying she drank the wrong milk, I made it back to the house in less than 1 minute, confirmed the reaction (wasn't hard) she had already thrown up, her voice was hoarse and she was blotchy and red, her nose was dripping and her upper lip was pretty swollen.  Epi-pen, stash them all in the car and head out to the hospital with the second one in hand just in case..  Took this photo in the car, the worst of the symptoms were gone by that point but the lip was still pretty big.

So that being said I've been getting pretty adventurous with flavouring icings and such.  Did a few trials recently which were pretty neat and worked pretty well.  I mentioned a large cupcake order (60 assorted cupcakes) and I did my classic vanilla with buttercream, chocolate with buttercream and vanilla with strawberry buttercream flavour..  AWESOME.  I got really excited and decided to try more combinations.

I now have a few more flavour oils to try.  I played with orange flavour oil this weekend.  I made one batch of my chocolate cake and split it in two..  With the first half I made a simple batch of chocolate cupcakes, with the second half of the batch I added orange flavour oil directly to the batter with some orange zest.  When the cupcakes were baked, I whipped up a half batch of buttercream icing and flavoured it with the orange oil.  Well, the results were good, but could have been better.  I forgot to half the flavouring, so in both instances, the orange flavour was a bit too strong, though the amount would have been perfect for a full batch.  Also, I thought the zest in the cake would work better than it did, and since it wasn't visible at all, I figure I'll skip it next time and just stick to the oil.  The cake was iced with my chocolate icing recipe and my cupcakes were filled with the buttercream.  So there are so many new things in there that I learned to do, it was a very neat weekend.  The cake tasted a lot like a Terrys chocolate orange, which are tasty..  mmm..  They weren't made fancy, because I didn't need to really, they were just to try.

I made 2 other cakes with the first cupcake order I did.  One for the persons birthday (the cake was for her to bring home, the cupcakes were for the employees) and the other one was a special order hockey rink cake for 25 people.  Kept me busy that weekend for sure, but I was reasonably pleased with the results, though had some issues with cracking fondant..  The flowers were pretty nice, and I added a bit of lustre dust to make it sparkly, which gave it a nice effect..

All in all I'm getting more confident about my abilities in doing this.  I'm not awesome yet, but it's coming along!  I'm still snacking on cupcakes and cake, good thing I'm working out like a crazy person for the triathlon, and the great news is that my Daughter is fine, she's back to her regular old self running around and driving me crazy!