Russian Tip Piping & Flower Basket Cupcakes!
Makes 15 Cupcakes
- 2 cups plain all purpose flour
- 1/3 cup cornflour/fine cornstarch
- 4 teaspoons baking powder
- 3/4 cup caster or superfine sugar
- 1 cup juice
- 125g/4ozs. butter, melted
- 2 eggs, at room temperature
- 1 cup fruit, chopped into chunks or pureed (I used pureed banana and roughly chopped pineapple)
For frosting
- 190g/6.71ozs. butter, at room temperature
- 6 cups icing or confectioners sugar, sifted
- 6 tablespoons juice
- You will also need food colouring in pink, leaf green, yellow, red, purple and blue
- Russian tips, cling film and small piping bags
Step 1 - Make cupcakes. Preheat oven to 180C/350F and line 2 cupcake trays with 15 liners (or so). Whisk the flour, cornflour, baking powder and sugar in a large bowl until combined. In a jug measure the juice and whisk in the melted butter, eggs and fruit. Make a well in the dry ingredients and mix until just combined. Pour into a jug and fill the cupcakes pans about 3/4 of the way up. Bake for 20-25 minutes until a skewer inserted comes out clean.
Step 2 - Fit a beater attachment to your mixer and beat the butter until smooth. On low speed add the icing sugar and juice and then beat for 3-4 minutes until fluffy. You are best to ice these cupcakes just before you pipe them because this buttercream sets hard quite quickly and you need the buttercream soft to affix the flowers to. If you keep them in an airtight container until you need them the buttercream won't harden. Spread them with the white buttercream. Then divide the colours up into six bowls. Colour each bowl with the colours above (or choose any that you like). Cover with cling film.
Step 3 - Take a piece of cling film (I used press and seal) and spread a rectangle of the outer colour that you want (leave the green for the leaves). If it helps you can write a guide as to what flower combos you want. Then along the middle of the rectangle make a log of the centre colour. Then gather up the sides and roll it into a log making sure the outside colour encloses the inside log. Snip off one of the twisted log. Place the Russian tip you want to use in a piping bag, snip off the end and then place the log into the piping bag. Pipe a flower a couple of times just to make sure you get the two colours coming out at once.
Step 4 - Now Russian tips require a bit of practice. Each one requires a different amount of pressure to it but they all need to start on the buttercream to adhere to it. I found the first cupcake was a bit wonky but once I got onto the second one it went much better. Pipe the flowers as close together as possible. Then place the green buttercream in a piping bag fitted with a leaf tip (there are several #65, 67,74 etc, I used #352) and pipe leaves where there are gaps or just around the outside. If you have found that you have a little bit left in each bag make a mixed bouquet.
Step 5 - To make basket handles, take thin wires (available from cake supply stores) and wrap some thick twine around them knotting them at each end and leaving about 1cm or half an inch at each end to poke them into the cupcakes.