Novelty Microphone Karaoke Cupcakes
In January of this year (2011) I was tasked with baking the cake for my partner’s daughters’ 15th birthday and as she was going to a recording studio with friends I thought it would be nice to bake some cupcakes that reflected her singing experience.
A week or so before I’d bought a book that was filled with unusual cupcake decorating ideas and in there was the instructions for making microphone cupcakes, perfect!
The book is great, but it is American and so it talks about all kinds of ingredients I’ve never heard of and aren’t readily available in our supermarkets, however I carried on regardless and produced these sparkly little microphone cupcakes. See if you can spot which one is mine and which is the photo from the book (ha ha)! :-p
Cupcakes Aloud with these novelty microphone cakes
The instructions said to use doughnut holes to make the microphone, but I couldn’t find where to get doughnut holes (I.e. the middle of ring doughnuts) anywhere, so I used small plain doughnuts instead. However these were a bit too big, so I used a round pastry cutter to reduce the size of it and this gave a much better fit.
I also got a different size and colour dragees (balls) for the microphone, to those in the book because I couldn’t find a big box of the size they stipulated and figured a small tub of them wasn’t likely to go far. I don’t think the colour mattered but i think the smaller balls would have given a better effect.
When it came to the buttercream I followed their instructions and cheated, using a couple of tubs of Betty Crocker ready made buttercream! I have to say I wasn’t that sure about using it, but I was constrained on time, i wanted to get the really bright candy pink colour and I thought I might as well try it if only once.
It was quite nice really. Very sweet and of course not as nice as fresh buttercream, but for something that comes out of a can it did the job on this occasion. As it’s bright White it gave the perfect pink colour I was after. I also added a couple of drops of wafer into the tub which made it go a little bit further.
I assembled the microphones by running buttercream around the edge of the ice-cream cone, placing the doughnut inside (with the buttercream securing it), coating the doughnut with buttercream and then rolling it in a bowl full of gold balls.
I iced the cupcakes with the bright pink icing and placed a microphone on top of each one as I went.
Cupcake Tip: be careful when placing the microphones on the cupcake as it is top-heavy, causing the microphone to fall off and when this happens the little balls fall off and go everywhere – we found them around the house for days afterwards!
The finished effect wasn’t as good as the book, but it was ok for a first attempt. However, these cakes are definitely more for looking at than eating, well the microphone part anyway, as when you bite through the dragee covered doughnut ball it sounds like you’ve lost a tooth or two!
