Hello, Cupcake

Hi, I'm Karen Tack. And I'm Alan Richardson. And we're the authors of Hello! Cupcake, where we take cupcakes and cookies and candies and transform them into magical desserts. It's almost like taking found objects and creating sculpture that you might find in a gallery or muse Yeah, only you can eat them. You can eat them, right? And what's fun is that you don't need to be a pastry chef or need any special equipment. And I think we should maybe share some of our fun techniques with you. There are a lot of things in here. Hey Karen, How about making some corn on the cob? Sounds good to me. I love corn on the cob. So what are we starting with? Well, you've got this frosting tinted yellow. Over here we've got a whole plethora of yellow and white jelly beans. And these are fabulous. What are those? The gourmet jelly bellies. We've got banana flavor, pineapple, coconut, vanilla bean. So that's, So to start with, I want to show you how to frost a cupcake. Okay? I am a Mores More girl. I don't want to see you being wimpy and putting just a little bit of frosting on top. A nice big dollop. Because remember, in the end, I can always take that off. Okay? So we've got our spatula. I'm way ahead of you. Well, this is my favorite tool. This is an offset spatula. And if you want to do any type of cupcake, I really recommend you get this. You can find it at a craft store, some baking stores, even online. But it is a must. So I've got my frosting on top, a nice dollop. And what I'm doing, I'm right-handed. So I'm going to push the frosting in one direction to the outer edge of the cupcake. Well, with my other hand, my left hand, I'm turning in the opposite direction. So does that make sense? It makes total sense. And a year ago, I didn't even know where to buy frosting. Karen taught me how to do this. So I've got a nice mound on top. It's all to the edge, but I don't need that much. Because I just need enough to glue the jelly beans on top. I'm taking my spatula again, putting it at angle, and twisting my cupcake while swiping the excess frosting off the top. And then that little bit we can round off. So there's my cupcake. I've got three here assembled on a corn dish. Okay? And now the fun part. We take a nice handful of our jelly beans. Does it matter what order? Well, I And I start in the center of the cupcake. And I'm going to go right down the center of all three. I'll get it started in the first row. And we're going to end up with about five rows. So then you can start with two rows on either side. And as you can see, I'm just taking any jelly bean here. It could be a white, white, yellow, whatever. So however the mix ends up, that's how you do it. That's how I do it. I just want to keep my lines straight. So I can finish this up. You want to start making a pad of butter for me? What's corn without butter? So we Right, right. And they come in a lot of different brands, but the Laffy Taffy is a perfect size for this. We find the candy that's the right color already looks You So you cut it to a square. You use a little bit of the heat from your fingers just to soften the edges. Yeah, and we also, it wants to soften it even more. You can pop it in the microwave for no more than three seconds. So the butter has got these great little corn holders. Put one on either end. One step more. We've got this white and black decorating sugar. Just sprinkle that on top. It's not really necessary, but it just makes it that much cuter. There's your corn. There you go. Happy Fourth of July.