WOP: Cupcakes and Cocktails

On Monday night my sis­ter and I went to our first Wel­ling­ton on a Plate event – the way sold-out (they added a couple more ses­sions even) Cup­cakes and Cock­tails at Martha’s Pantry. Giv­en that neither of us is a slouch in the kit­chen or bar, we wer­en’t sure how much we’d actu­ally learn from the event, but since cup­cakes and cock­tails are two of our favour­ite things, we thought we’d give it a go. And when we walked in the door and saw that the McK­en­zie broth­ers were doing the mix­ing, we knew we were in safe hands.

I fig­ure I’ll do this post basic­ally just a series of cup­cake porn pho­tos. You don’t mind, do you? Good.

This was what was wait­ing for each of us at the tables – sand­wiches to nibble on, cup­cakes, icing and the cup­cake recipe. We were also giv­en Winter Pimms Punch to drink.

We had a couple of demon­stra­tions about dif­fer­ent ways to pipe, and were let loose on our own cock­tails.

You can see here that we had vary­ing tech­niques and levels of suc­cess with that.

Then, before too much icing could acci­dently end up in our mouths, Justin McK­en­zie, wear­ing one blue glove that was kind of creepy let us in on the magic for­mula for cock­tails: two parts strong, one part sweet, one part sour. It’s so simple, I wasted all that money in Hooch and Hawthorne and Cuckoo for noth­ing!

So here we have lime juice, Dam­son Plum & Vanilla pur­ee, and Stolen Rum. Stolen Rum actu­ally fits the whole Wel­ling­ton on a Plate (or in a glass) theme really well, as one of its two cre­at­ors, Jam­ie Duff, is a part-time Wel­ling­to­ni­an – when he’s not off plun­der­ing the Carib­bean, that is.

So you shake all the ingredi­ents togeth­er, and you get this:

Yum! I sus­pect if you don’t want to make it your­self, you might be able to get it at one of their bars. Then it was time to get dec­or­at­ing our cup­cakes, by pip­ing white chocol­ate shapes onto tem­plates drawn under wax paper:

This comes in handy if you want your cup­cakes to act as instruc­tion­al manu­als. “Jo, eat me”

We also learnt how to form flowers from roy­al icing

So we ended up with a box of ridicu­lously over­dec­or­ated cup­cakes to take home, and man, they were deli­cious!

I would dis­pute the event’s billing itself as “there will be plenty of cock­tails”, but I guess some­times you have to go for qual­ity over quant­ity. It was a lot of fun, and I am super keen to make my own cup­cakes with piped icing now.