Teacher's Day Cupcakes

Cupcakes decorated by little hands, straight from her heart :)

For her cousins, frosted with just buttercream, m&m's
and modeling chocolate.

Happy Teachers' Day! The kids in schools are celebrating Teachers' Day today. My little one wanted to bake some frosted cupcakes for her teachers in school. Her requirement is fondant covered cupcakes - so as her "assistant" for this event, I made a trip to Phoon Huat to get a small tub of Satin Ice Rolled Fondant. Unfortunately, the white color fondant was not available, so I got the baby blue one instead.

For the buttercream, it was kinda last minute when I decided to make some. In my last attempt to make fondant cupcakes, I did not need any buttercream as the fondant was able to "sit" on the cupcake, perhaps due to the paper cups I used. In any case, "chef" of the day requested buttercream, so I found this small batch buttercream recipe. Many thanks to Celebrating Sweets' recipe, it is very useful as I know we just needed a bit of buttercream to keep the fondant in place. I recalled throwing away buttercream made using another recipe, and really do not want to waste food like that again. Also, this buttercream recipe only uses icing sugar, butter, vanilla essence and a tsp of fresh milk. It was just nice for frosting 11 cupcakes thinly.

It was a breeze to bake the chocolate cupcakes, and I am sure I will use this recipe from FoodieBaker again and again, especially helpful for baking large quantities of decorated cupcakes. Honestly, I was skeptical about the taste of this cupcake initially as the recipe uses oil, but the result was a definite "yummy!". It is soft and goes well with the buttercream and fondant.

While the cupcakes were being baked, "chef" started her fondant decoration. While decorating, she looked serious at times, and goofy other times, especially when she popped m&m's into her mouth while decorating! :p She told me that was the "best part of making cupcakes" :D

The part I dreaded most was the cleaning up :p But seeing how much fun "chef" had, I guess it is worth it?

Do you remember what you brought to schools on Teachers' Day? I just happened to recall that my mom used to bake kueh bolu for us to bring to school on Teachers' Day. I still remember that my mom would bake these using a charcoal stove at our backyard (when we were still living in the Kampung) in the hot and humid Singapore weather. They smelled and tasted delicious and no matter how my classmates teased me about them, they were the yummiest cake to me. It is truly the love and sweat of a mother..

Happy Teachers' Day to all teachers! Whether you are school teachers, tuition teachers, piano teachers, gym teachers, mothers, etc... to me, as long as you are sincerely sharing your knowledge, you are a teacher :) Thank you for sharing your knowledge, which has benefited and appreciated by many people, and have a wonderful Teachers' Day! :)

The front most cupcake is the only one I got to
decorate, permission granted from "chef".

A gigantic cupcake among the rest, as I ran out of silicone cups.
Bad idea, as it needed more time to cook as compared to the smaller cupcakes.
So please use cups of same size for even baking and less trouble :p