When it comes to cakes and cupcakes we love nothing more than getting our teeth into detailed designs and something with an old fashioned twist! That’s what happened when we created a collection of golden anniversary cupcakes based on the idea of inherited family heirlooms and traditional style furnishings. We loved the idea of combining burnished golds with soft ivory and pearl white to make a nice bright selection of cupcakes! We were also sold on the amount of gold dust and pearlescent spray we’d end up using.

We both love anything that has the possibility of becoming pretty ‘fiddly’ so these cupcakes ended up involving some time consuming techniques such as hand painting (no stenciling here… or ever), and working with moulds that have tiny detailing. Below is  the metallic gold buttercream piped cupcake finished with the fondant cameo brooch. We studded the cameo with sugar pearls and then set it on an oval fondant ‘doily’.

Next to the cameo cupcake is a flat iced cupcake featuring a hand painted rose using just three colours (a reddish brown, a bright gold and some dark ivory). You can find a tutorial we put together on how to paint a rose design onto fondant here.

For another cupcake we re-created a pretty ruffled fabric corsage in flowerpaste to finish it with. We used three different sized flowerpaste circles layered into ruffles then added a button style brooch into its centre and edged the button with sugar pearls. You can find a tutorial on how to create this flower here.

A little bit of a damask crept into the collection too! We hand painted a design off centre of a flat iced cupcake to keep the design bright and un-fussy. Below, next to our damask painted cupcake, is a vanilla buttercream swirled cupcake finished with a hand painted brooch featuring tiny stems of roses.

This collection of golden anniversary cupcakes was not only fun for us to work on, but it pretty much covered everything in our design room with a lovely golden sheen for a good few days.