Chocolate Sponge Cupcake with Chocolate Ganache

Lately, I have been practicing decorating cupcakes with fondant, as well as finding the ultimate cupcake recipe  to prepare for my daughter's birthday at the end of this month. It may be too exaggerating to say that the preparation has been "nerve-wrecking", but sometimes it does feel that way! :p I have not done fondant for more than a year.



I've met with so many obstacles and made lots of blunders, just to name a few:

• originally planned not to use buttercream, tried ganache following the instructions in cutesweetthings and Bake Like a Pro, but seems like even using 2:1 ratio of chocolate to whipping cream, the ganache just will not harden :p as you can see from the photo above, the fondant kind of "floated" on the ganache - reminds me about the flooding in Singapore last weekend :p
• tried making marshmallow fondant, which turned out really messy as I made some mistakes with the sequence of the steps :p
• bought the ready fondant from Phoon Huat to make my life easier :p It was pretty easy to work on. Except when I tried to practice yesterday, the fondant was very very sticky. Yesterday happened to be one of the most humid and hot day, maybe that's why? Guess I will have better luck if I follow instructions kindly shared by Fait Maison - work in an air-conditioned room.
• because the fondant was sticky, when I tried making roses, the "petals" stuck to one another, argh :p
• after making around 4-5 trips to different Phoon Huat outlets, I equipped myself with some necessary tools - but you can never get enough of fondant tools! there are endless types of cutters, moulds, blah blah.. $$$ I did not want to spend too much as I may not make fondant cake that much. So I bought mostly cookie cutters :)

As a "full-dressed rehearsal", I made the chocolate sponge cupcakes with chocolate ganache, following recipe from QiQi in the house - which is unrelated to fondant cupcakes?? A symptom of over-stressing myself. I need to breathe and relax. My hubby was like "What's there to stress about? It's just a cake!" :D

Anyways, these cupcakes are very yummy. I used a simple ganache - 50g Emborg 35.1% fat whipped cream and 100g Hershey's semisweet chocolate chips.

Now, what do I bake for my princess's birthday?? :p

Note: Thanks to QiQi, BLAP, Fait Maison and cutesweetthings for selflessly sharing their knowledge.