Last weekend I took my first Cupcake Class at Genussakademie in Frankfurt. It was held by Ewa Feix who is a professional Cupcake Konditor and sells gorgeous Cupcakes in Frankfurt.

My friend sent me the link to the booking some weeks ago and asked me if I want to go. Hell yeah, why not?  Especially when it comes to Cupcakes I think I can still learn a lot! Decorating Cupcakes is an art itself and you know all these little bits and pieces of professional advice enhance your skills over time. So I booked the class and went there with my friend who discovered her love to baking just recently (I hope it was my good influence *hehe*).

After a glass of champagne and checking out the other participants, Ewa Feix welcomed us very warmly and shared some of her secrets with us. I must say I was a little dissapointed that we only made one type of cupcakes. But they were as delicious as they were pretty. Never ever made so good looking ones!

We made 4 groups with 5 people and started to prepare dough for raspberry cupcakes with swiss meringue butter cream. After transferring the cupcakes into the oven we turned to the decorations. This is the part that I liked the most and that was the most informative for me even though I already worked with fondant before. We made flowers out of fondant and gum paste and fondant lady bugs. While letting the decorations dry we moved back into the kitchen to prepare the swiss meringue butter cream and learned 4 different decoration techniques (piping with a star nozzle, rose nozzle, flower nozzle and using a knife). Don’t they look gorgeous? I didn’t know I was capable of doing such perfect looking cupcakes!

Here are the little bits and pieces that I learned (some of them are not new to me but I love to share them with you):

• preheat the oven for about 30 minutes – always! (even if you think your oven needs less time)
• use quality paper liners
• all ingredients should have room temperature
• mix all dry ingredients separately from the wet ingredients
• Mix all wet ingredients with a electric mixer BUT fold in the dry ingredients with a wooden spoon in order to not overdo the mixture. After that you can still use a electric mixer to mix everything thoroughly for max. 30 seconds
• use a icecream scoop to transfer the mixture into the lined tin to make sure the cupcakes have the same size
• bake directly! Never let the unbaked dough in the paper liners for more than 10 minutes before putting them into the oven
• Mix Fondant 1:1 with Gum Paste to get very stable flowers
• corn starch prevents fondant from sticking to warm hands
• rub cutters over foam pad or hand to straighten the edges of the cut out flowers
• keep the packaging of Toffifee! It is a perfect tool for fondant flower making  🙂
• pasteurizing eggwhites for swiss meringue butter cream needs a lot of muscles (Thanks Katja!) but is totally neccessary
• the butter cream keeps fresh for 3 days
• Piping always starts with a c for cupcake
• Do not store cupcakes in an airtight container – it’ll ruin them! Better keep them in cardboard boxes
• Serve cupcakes at room temperature. If you store them in the fridge, pull them out 1 hour before serving them

Thank you Ewa Feix!