Late Night Flowers

Husband and I have numerous friends and acquaintances, yet I can honestly say our best friends at this point, that we see regularly, would be his cousin (Lippietjies) and the fiance (Spongy).  Now the funny thing is, we met them about 5 years ago, and somehow, Husband and Lippietjies, and Spongy and I just grew into a strong group of friends.

To make this story even more interesting, Lippietjies and Husband's mothers were friends way back in the day before he was even born, and Lippietjies was friends with his older sister (let's call her Froggie).  Seems this world is rather small, as Lippietjies and Husband are also cousins from his mom's sister's side.

But I digress.  These two women are the type of friends that you can call at midnight, and, if you haven't pissed them off, they will be there when you need them.  For the past two weeks they have been DIYing it at home, and I decided after all their efforts, to take them something to nibble.

Now I also have to say, Spongy has what she calls a hillbilly palate.  Give her beans on toast (never at Tiffany's though) and she's happy.  So when it comes to sweet stuff, you know, those decadent little things that you only smell in passing at a decent bakery and you can feel the inside seams of your jeans splitting because of the weight you inexplicably gained while stuffing your mouth with the "low fat, no sugar" chocolate eclair you bought this morning, she prefers Vanilla Cupcakes.

I can respect that as a cupcake is a moist little morsel (if not over baked) and if the frosting is correct, you cannot complain.  Now in true Tiffany's style, I decided a plain vanilla cupcake is so not going to cut it.  Thus enters the late night flowers.  Since yellow and blue are the colours Spongy looks for in a cupcake, I decided to indulge that and add both, hence the yellow flowers, and blue powdered frosting.

Now we're getting to the actual part of this post, making the (thank you Mrs Brown for the word) fecking flowers.  I haven't done sugar flowers in a good 10 years or more, but it went something like this:

1.  23:40pm

Tear off a smallish chunk of white plastic icing and get a little bit of green liquid food colouring on it for the green bits.

2.  23:42

Knead the crap out of said piece of plastic icing, only to remember mom's wise words of long ago:  Never use liquid for plastic icing.  Always powder or gel.

3.  23:48

Furiously add icing sugar to stiffen the dough and skip in the kitchen as I realise the powders I bought happens to be yellow and blue, which makes green.  Paste saved.

4.  00:00

Skip the liquid yellow and just add powder directly.  Knead furiously.  Divide and add white 4 times to end up with 5 shades of yellow.

5.  00:15

Sigh and look at the block of holsum as I know this is gonna get greasy.  Rub holsum on the metal rolling pin and the rolling board.  And for the next three hours all I did was roll a piece of paste, cut the petals, shape the petals and assemble the flowers.

I have to admit, I forgot how much fun it is to play with sugar paste, but I can promise you, it's not something I will often do.
All that's left to say is:  Hurrah for cupcakes!!!  Hope Spongy approves of them.

PS:  I almost forgot to say thank you to  Sugar Momma for giving me all the nifty sugar crafting tools.