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Was that a surprise or what! A beautiful wrapper and inside a voucher for a morning Christmas cupcakes workshop at the Bertinet Kitchen Cookery School in Bath, UK. Wow, what a wonderful birthday present!!! I had never been in any cookery school until then. That is why the excitement  was even bigger when the D-day finally arrived.

The first thing when you approach Bath is the impression of how beautiful this ancient city actually is. It is a truly fantastic place for a cookery school like The Bertinet kitchen. The school is based in the center of this historic city. I missed the entrance at first attempt but what I received was a warm welcome with tea or coffee. How thoughtful considering it was a cold winter day.

I was a bit worried about a lack of cupcake decorating skills at first but was soon relieved to learn that it wasn't only me being a beginner in the class.

Sara Stanley, our teacher introduced herself and said a few words about cupcake recipes and cupcake decorating ideas which we were then supposed to use in the workshop. The whole idea is that participants work together around a big wooden tabletop and set to work straight away, simple.

What was this all about?

We had to start with something so a warm up task was to moist freshly baked (and still warm) spiced vanilla cupcakes with spirit syrup. To improve the absorption we pierced each cupcake a few times with a thin skewer (a wooden kebab skewer is ideal).

That led to the "real" work. The first challenge was to make angel cupcakes with a small angel at the top. We used white frosting (made out of royal icing and water), sugar paste, paste colors and gold dusting powder.

Sara then skilfully demonstrated:

- how to do the body of the angel and cut out the wings,

- how to color the sugar paste with a gold color and roll it out. Then we used a small flower cookie cutter to cut out small flowers which we later used as decoration for our angel cake.

- how to pipe white frosting onto a cupcake and decorate it with an angel and small flowers.

We clearly needed a short break after this initial splash of tasks and then continued with holly & flower cupcakes. The method was very similar to the first batch, there was just more cutting. We rolled out a green sugar paste and cut out a pile of holly shaped leaves. Then we rolled out and used big and small white flowers for further decoration. Sara demonstrated how to dust small flowers with gold dusting powder. Before starting with the decoration we made a base with brandy buttercream piped onto spiced vanilla cupcakes.

As far as I am concerned learning the art of piping including how to make a piping bag out of greaseproof paper was definitely the most interesting part of the lesson. There was a lot of laughing when we tried to make a proper piping bag. But believe me, it is not as easy as it looks at first.

Buttercream and chocolate Christmas trees

Sara first demonstrated how to hold and control the piping bag and then showed how piping should be properly done. I thought, "this is a child's play", but after a few attempts it became clear that a lot of practice is actually needed to achieve really good results. I kind of heavy-squeezed the bag but instead of shooting down trough the nozzle the buttercream almost splashed straight up into my face.

The main point of this exercise was piping brandy buttercream on the spiced vanilla cupcakes that are decorated with small chocolate Christmas trees - fabulous! We filled greaseproof paper piping bags with tempered chocolate and piped Christmas tree shapes onto a cling film. To make your perfect chocolate Christmas tree you need to develop some skill and have to work very quickly because the chocolate is quiet runny.

The chocolate trees need to cool down before any manipulation and putting them into a fridge speeds up the process considerably. In spite of some initial problems all the chocolate Christmas trees looked fantastic and of course so did our Christmas  cupcakes afterwards. Well, OK, I've got to show off a little bit...

Rum ganache truffle cupcakes

The last part of the session involved producing rum ganache truffle cupcakes. Rich chocolate cupcakes were baked in advance of course. Sara explained the recipe and the baking method. The first step for us was to pierce the baked chocolate cupcakes and soak them in the rum syrup.  

Sara then demonstrated how to make the rum ganache. She filled up a big piping bag with the freshly made ganache and we all piped it onto chocolate cupcakes. Piping small raindrop shapes was particularly demanding. My raindrops looked more like pyramids. Yep, I definitely need more training for this kind of shapes.

After piping rum ganache onto chocolate cupcakes we dusted our somewhat imperfect raindrops with cocoa powder through a tea strainer (this is a so called dusted truffle-style technique). Great trick to achieve a professional look for your cupcakes.

At the end of the workshop Sara gave us some very useful information on where we can buy quality food colors, dusting powders, disposal bags for piping, cutters and other materials for cupcake decoration. Of course, we all attacked with a series of questions about cupcake recipes, cupcake decorating ideas and problems with cupcake decorations. She was really totally nice and tried her best to answer every single one of them, amazing! 

Right, that's it. Perhaps I forgot something but all in all this is the essence of what we were taught. I enjoyed every minute of the workshop and had such great fun. But what counts most is the fact that I will be able to use all the cupcake decorating techniques, cupcake recipes and cupcake decorating ideas, enabling me to develop more recipes and pages on this web site for you.

There is no question that in the future I will attend more workshops like this one. It is a great way to learn and meet new people with similar interests.

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