Patriotic Red/White/Blue Olympics Theme Party Cupcakes

Olympics London 2012 Patriotic Red, White and Blue Cupcakes

London Olympics 2012 themed patriotic red, white and blue decorated
cupcakes for a London Olympic themed birthday party.

First of all, please excuse the iPhone photos. I didn’t have time to take some high-quality piccies (you’ll see why below as you read on!)

My ‘future’ sister in law, Nicola knows that I bake as a hobby, and instead of buying cupcakes from the store she asked if I would do the cupcakes for her son, Jack’s 11th birthday party. “Sure”, I said not realising that It also fell on Easter Sunday.

They were wanting to do an Olympics theme since the Olympics is held here in the UK for 2012.
“How many?” I asked. 48 was the answer. I managed to mutter a stressed “OK.

I CAN do this, I told myself! We brainstormed a few ideas but kept going back to the patriotic red, white and blue colour theme. This got my creative juices flowing…

Yes, they’re hand painted gumpaste bunting flags. I started these puppies on Friday night. Used the wonderful Americolor food colour markers and a clean ruler and hand drew the red lines (as seen in the St. George’s flags above).

As for the blue, no ruler was used, that was all hand drawing, baby! 😉 But man alive, they took such a long time, my eyes were bleeding from the close-up details too.

Also, not sure if you can tell but I applied some lustre dust on them after they dried to create that beautiful sheen — totally made them great! I was really happy.

Everything took me so long to create….

Friday:

• Started working on the gum paste bunting flags on Friday.
• Coloured in most of the bunting flags but took a break since I was going completely cross-eyed and blind from the details!
• Baked first half (24) of the cupcakes.

Saturday:

• Finished hand pairing the remaining bunting flags and awaiting for them to dry before applying a light coat of luster dust to all the bunting flags.
• Baked second half of the cupcakes (another 24 to make 48 in total).
• Starting colouring more gum paste, rolling it out and cutting the different coloured Olympic rings (can’t really see them in the photos), coloured even more gum paste and created the red/white/blue London coloured circles.
• Finished at 1:30 in the morning and still no buttercream applied… got stressed, very, very, stressed!

Sunday:

• Forced myself out of bed in the morning at the ass crack of dawn to try and finish decorating, make and pipe 36 of the remaining cupcakes. Did I mention I was stressed?
• Don’t know how I did it but I managed to get the remaining 36 cupcakes decorated with buttercream frosting…
  • The red cups with red/white/blue patriotic sprinkles.
    – The white and blue cups with alternating buttercream colours and the hand made gum paste bunting Union Jack and England flags,
  • And there were also the tri-coloured red/white/blue buttercream swirls with the gum paste Olympic rings and red/white/blue London circles. They both had Union Jack cupcake cases.

Finally managed to get all done by 12 noon after my other future sis in law, Rachel had turned up to pick me up even though we were supposed to arrive at 12 noon!

Phew! *wipes sweat from brow* I wanted to prettify them further but there was literally no time. However, got sooooo many compliments on the cakes which made me smile like a Cheshire cat! A couple of the ladies took some of my business cards too, to hand out to their friends!

The recipe for these Vanilla cupcakes is here. But bakes at 180°C/350°F for 15-18 minutes.

Yes, it’s took me 2 days to recuperate and get this post up! 😆

This post was also featured on: