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.