WEDDING REHEARSAL CUPCAKE EPIC, EPIC, FAIL

The Plan: 65 cupcakes for a wedding rehearsal dinner.
- 25 double chocolate fudge cupcakes filled with dulce de leche topped with Kahlua whipped chocolate ganache frosting
- 20 triple vanilla cupcakes filled with blueberry mousse cream topped with vanilla cream cheese frosting
- 20 triple vanilla cupcakes filled with strawberry mousse cream topped with vanilla cream cheese frosting And each cupcake would be topped with a heart-shaped fondant topper embossed with the bride and groom's first initial's and sprinkled with edible glitter.

Sounds simple, right? In reality, not so much.

On the day of, everything that could have gone wrong, did.

The day started out rather well. I woke up really early, giving myself five hours to complete The Plan and arrive at the rehearsal site by 3:30. Everything was looking good. The fondant hearts were already done and by 10:00 the double chocolate fudge cupcakes had been baked, the fillings had been made and were cooling in the freezer. I was just about to start on the vanilla cupcakes and everything from there on out went straight downhill.

The recipe for the vanilla cupcakes did not yield the 20 that I was expecting. Fail #1. This I knew, was attainable, as I had attained 20 cupcakes at Jessie's house when we first baked the triple vanilla cupcakes. Whatever, moving on. As soon as the first batch were in the oven I began making the second batch. The second batch baked as the first batch were cooling and low and behold, the cupcake liners were slowly but surely peeling away from the cupcakes! Fail #2. These were cupcake liners that I had purchased online in the colours of the bride and groom's wedding because I couldn't find them in-store at Michael's or Walmart or Bulk Barn. I chose the same brand as the black ones that I had purchased for a previous wedding but for some reason, these ones were peeling away! And I knew it couldn't have been the recipe I chose because I had fantastic results with the same recipe with the same liner in a different colour. At this point I was completely freaking out as I couldn't serve cupcakes that had no liner and I only had enough butter for one more batch of cupcakes. So I made the last batch of vanilla cupcakes in regular white cupcake liners and hoped that these liners would be okay. As I was getting the flour and baking powder mixed together I realized I was on the last dregs on my 10kg bag of flour! How could that be? How could I be out of flour? I tried to get out as much flour out of that bag as I could but I still short about half a 1/3 of a cup of flour and subbed it with cake flour. Fail #3. I hoped that the 1/6 of a cup of cake flour out of the entire 2-2/3 cup of AP flour wouldn't make that much of a difference.

At this point I gave myself two options: go to Michael's and purchase ribbon to tie around the bottom of the cupcakes to make up for lack of liner and up the presentation factor OR go out and buy more butter and flour. The latter wasn't really an option since the butter wouldn't have been room temperature anyway. The former it was! I spent 40 minutes round-trip purchasing four different types of purple and yellow ribbon only to have Sean show up and help me tie the ribbon but then realize that I hadn't purchased enough. Clearly, 18m of ribbon is only enough to wrap like...8 cupcakes, not 20! Fail #4! At this point I had no choice but to go with the unlined cupcakes. It was devastating. Being a perfectionist, I cringed at the thought of presenting less than stellar cupcakes but I didn't really have any other option. I was already running incredibly late as I'm the type of person who likes to arrive early at these sorts of things.

Finally, an hour later than intended, Sean and I left for the wedding rehearsal site. When all was said and done, the cupcakes looked amazing even despite the missing liners and I know that they tasted amazing so I'm hoping that the bride and groom are happy with the results. It was all very rush, rush so I set-up as quickly as I could without making it look like a rush job but didn't have a chance to make contact with the bride-to-be.

So after four major failures, it was what I would consider a true cupcake failure but I managed to pull myself together and get the job done. Why life likes to play such cruel jokes on me, I don't know, but the cupcakes still looked good and the double chocolate fudge cupcakes tasted better than ever. My dad even sampled one and complimented me on how "fin" it tasted. That's a winner in my books as my dad's comments usually begin with "next time..."

Here's a little teaser...More photos to come...

WEDDING CUPCAKE PHOTO SHOOT

And just because they took forever to make, here's way more shots than you probably ever expected.

The casualties that never made it to the wedding (there were more but these ones made it out for the shoot):I kind of love the aerial shots (if you haven't noticed already).

And a shoot with flowers...the strawberry and toasted coconut with vanilla bean and coconut rum buttercream:
The double fudge chocolate filled with dulce de leche with whipped dark chocolate Kahlua ganache:
And a couple sans flowers. The double chocolate fudge:and strawberry and toasted coconut:I have to admit that I totally stole the two best cupcakes from the cupcakes boxes as I was piping them. As I was piping, I pointed and told Sean that I wanted to keep those ones but he was all "keep piping!" Then when he wasn't looking, I swiped the two best-looking piped ones and kept them to photograph later, mwuahaha.

WEDDING CUPCAKE RECAP

It was a long 12 hours. Yep, that's right, 12 freakin' hours. There weren't many meltdowns--maybe just one and a minor one at that. It was really just a lot of waiting around for cupcakes to bake and then washing dishes.

The setbacks? There were a few. The first was running out of strawberries and then vanilla extract. Luckily Sean was around to lend some moral support and make a late-night run to the grocery store to pick up said items, as well as extra heavy cream, which came in handy. Another setback? Forgetting to measure out the right amount of chocolate for the whipped chocolate ganache frosting and then doing it midway while the heavy cream was cooling down. My initial ganache recipe was therefore f'ed so I had to improvise and am happy to say that it turned out marvelously, despite the clumps of chocolate stuck in the frosting tip. Thanks to Sean and his days at the Sobey's bakery, he was able to let me in on his "frosting tip under running hot water" trick.

Let's back up to the process a bit though. I was kind of given free reign with the wedding cupcakes, which initially made me really nervous. The bride's comments were something along the lines of "whatever they are, I know they're be great" which made me feel good that she had so much faith in me, but also made me nervous because I knew the cupcakes had to be spectacular. I think that's why I pulled out all the stops. The cupcakes chosen (or suggested by me and approved by her) were a strawberry and toasted coconut cupcake with vanilla bean and coconut rum buttercream as well as a double chocolate fudge cupcake filled with dulce de leche and topped with a whipped dark chocolate Kahlua ganache. Initially the toppers were supposed to be chocolate shortbread cookies with embossed initials of the newly married couple. I did a test run about a month back but in all honesty, the photographed cupcakes didn't look spectacular. They tasted great but they didn't look very awesome. Who really wants a miniature cookie sticking out of a cupcake? I decided to go with dainty little sugar flowers instead and I'm glad I did because it really suited the classy black and white theme of the wedding. I made the sugar flowers a week in advance and am really glad that I did. Putting on the silver dragees took three hours alone because it involved piping the royal icing with my left hand while placing the dragee with my right hand with a pair of tweezers. Insane work, I tell ya! It is not for the faint of heart. It was tedious and time consuming and certainly fiddly. But the flowers looked so cute and perfect afterwards.

The majority of the cupcakes were made the night before, finishing up the last batch 12 hours before they were due. I then woke up five hours later and made the last batch of cupcakes--making extras for any mishaps--and then began frosting. Surprisingly, I didn't feel tired, but there was a LOT of yawning later in the day and perhaps a little bit of a nap at Corey and Bryanne's place. In total there were 144 cupcakes. I planned on making extras as "back-ups" for the car ride to Oshawa. I wanted to be able to swap out the "casualties" that didn't make the car ride over for the "good" ones. I didn't really plan on making THAT many but because of the two different recipes I was using, it just happened to make that many. It was okay; I didn't hear my co-workers complaining.

Piping the cupcakes wasn't too hard. I had piped cupcakes several dozen times before and have pretty much perfected my piping skills. There were a few that didn't look so hot and those are the ones I asked Sean to scrape the frosting off so I could re-pipe them. Thank goodness for the extra set of hands because I really needed them. As I piped, Sean placed the sugar flowers on top of the cupcakes. (FYI: I used my trusty 1M tip for the piping.)

I was done at 12:58pm, two minutes before my self-imposed 1pm deadline. Sean and I packed the car in about 30 minutes and made our way to Oshawa. The traffic, for the most part, was non-existent, so the car ride took about 45 minutes and the entire way there I was internally fretting about what would happen should we get into a fender bender. How would I salvage the cupcakes? Could they even be salvaged? What if the accident was so bad that Sean and I couldn't make it out right away? What if the "jaws of life" had to come get us out? All kinds of crazy thoughts were running through my head and at one point, when we hit a blip of traffic, I'm pretty sure I was about to have a panic attack. my heart started racing and my palms were getting sweaty and I was worried that we wouldn't make it to the reception hall in time for our 3pm deadline; I still needed time to set up the cupcakes! But we made it there in time, accident free, with plenty of time for me to van-vaner with the cupcakes on the cupcake stands made by the bride and her bridesmaids. It took about 30 minutes to set up the cupcakes (deciding whether to alternate the cupcakes on the same tier or whether to separate them was a bit of a pickle that Sean didn't understand) but afterwards, they looked marvelous. And I have to admit, I was a proud Cupcake Mama.

I set up all 102 cupcakes, took a few pics for the memories and then sadly, said goodbye to my babies:Stay tuned for part two...featuring more photos!