Holly's 6th Year Cupcakes

Hello Readers,

Typically I will be only posting to this blog if it is related to gaming. Happily my co-worker/friends daughter is turning 6! The theme of her cupcakes was 'bowling' which qualifies as an update, it is after all a game themed creation.


According to the Bowling Museum,

"Bowling has a long and rich history, and today it is one of the most popular sports in the world. A British anthropologist, Sir Flinders Petrie, discovered in the 1930's a collection of objects in a child's grave in Egypt that appeared to him to be used for a crude form of bowling."

The main recipes for these beautiful little cakes and icing toppings follow my standard cupcake formula's from my first post. The difference is you add 2 tablespoons of baking cocoa and about a half cup of chocolate chips into the batter for a richer taste if you would like yours to be chocolate. For these cupcakes I also added half a tablespoon of Jello's instant vanilla pudding to add moisture and a little more delicate fluff to the cake.

Sugar-Craft Tools

I made these cupcakes over a time-span of two days. As I had to work late nights it was easier and much more practical to make the fondant decorations a day early to allow them to dry enough to not fall apart when it was time to decorate the cakes. The fondant itself is simple store bought pre-packaged fondant and the tools I have picked up online.


The matt is silicone. And while it is not 100% perfect, it is still advisable to use so the fondant has less chance to stick to everything (which it will anyway, just less so). I was lucky enough to have my friend buy me a simple sugar-craft mould to  create the bowling balls and pins. After much trial and error I found the best way was to push fondant into the mould than scrape off the excess, gently rolling the items out of the form and setting them down on the silicone mat to start to firm and dry. Fondant will always retain softness, always be careful handling it. I did not have the time to decorate the bowling pins with a red fondant stripe so I cheated. The red stripe is simply a hand painted line of edible food colouring that would do the job quickly as a decoration, touched up with some edible red glitter. For the bowling balls I used the same mould and simply left them as they were.

Now for the cakes themselves. I needed to make 24 cupcakes so I tripled the recipe. There is always room to make more cupcakes unless some of the wrappers become loose on cooling or you have family members around who would like to try them, for quality purposes, of course.

For the cupcakes themselves I made a simple batter using my formula, added cocoa to make them chocolate, dropped in chocolate drops for extra chocolate and mixed it around on high speed for about 3 minutes to make sure it was well incorporated, adding in a little milk when my batter looked a bit too stiff. Typically I will do that when I add the instant jello vanilla pudding mix into the ingredients.

The best way to measure the batter into the cups is to use an ice cream scooper with a cogged mechanical handle. You simply scoop it up like ice cream and carefully drop it into the cups. This helps with a consistent height if you desire all of your cakes to the the same size.

The icing is my favourite part, after awhile you will start to recognise the right consistency. I began by mixing the butter cream icing in my mixer and finished it off by mixing it with my hand mixer on high speed. The reason behind that is to help the icing turn more into a creamy whipped buttercream. I find mixing it in the mixer alone results in a grainy texture, where continuing to mix it with a hand blender will help mix the butter fat better into the sugar and milk. These cupcakes had a slight dash of candy floss flavouring and vanilla added into it to give the cakes a sweet aroma and taste.


After cooling and frosting the cakes there was a light dusting of edible sparkling blue glitter followed by the toppers.


If you are curious about cake boxes, Amazon has an amazing selection of re-usable cardboard boxes that look incredibly professional and they are highly recommended by me.

Here they are, Bowling Ball Cupcakes!

I wish Holly a very happy 6th birthday playing games with her friends!

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