Birthday Cupcakes

It was S's birthday on Thursday so I decided to bake some cupcakes. I've had some interesting encounters with icing colors in the past because I love to play with color but for these I had a very specific plan in mind. S appreciates dorky things like I do, and he'd recently shown me a steam punk cake he'd found, so I wanted to do my best to create cupcakes in the steam punk theme. I knew there was no way that my designs could look anywhere near as cool as this cake because I don't know how to work with fondant or any of those fancy cake things and I'm not a cake artist, but I figured I'd give it a go with icing or food gel or whatever I could find.

I wasn't expecting perfection by any means, but I figured that with the right tools I could at least pull of sort of a funky, cute version of steampunk. However, finding the tools was the biggest problem since I wanted browns, golds, and silvers as my color palette and I couldn't decide whether to color frosting or try with food gel.

Before I go any further into the decorating details, let me stop off at Steampunk and explain it. Steampunk refers to a genre of science fiction which melds things from the steam power era/Victorian times with science fiction and fantasy and technology. According to the always reliable Wikipedia, the whole subculture came into prominence in the 1980's and '90s, but I've only started seeing it prominently recently. It was even featured on the abc show Castle a week or two ago. In any case, as far as design aesthetics, steampunk often fuses modern technology with steam technology. Some prominent features are gears and clocks etc. I first started noticing steampunk on Etsy.com where there are often pocket watches, necklaces, and accessories desginated as steampunk.

Anyway, back to the cupcakes. I went to Michael's and found brown food dye, silver sprinkles, gold glittery gel and clear dyable food gel. I had really been hoping for gold or silver powder or dye but I decided brown would work, like the cake above. I don't know why, but I was set on vanilla cake with vanilla frosting, even though using chocolate might have made more sense since it's already brown.

Icing is always harder to work with than I anticipate and the gold food gel didn't work as neatly as I hoped so things ended up pretty messy, but at least I tried. I played around with the brown colors to get some lighter ones and some darker ones and then dyed the food gel too. I had drawn out all these images of gears but it just didn't translate well to the cupcake. The most successful were probably the clocks, but I didn't want a box full of clocks so I tried some keys and kept trying to get the gears right. I'd say the whole thing was mildly successful. At least they tasted good and a few of them looked good. It didn't seem to stop S from eating them, particularly the clocks, so I guess it must have been ok after all.