The Last Days of Hogwarts... Rife with Frosting Failures

As a big yet not-too-crazy fan of the Harry Potter series - first books, then movies - I was quite sad to see them go. This sentiment was shared by many of my friends, one of whom was celebrating a July birthday and decided to coordinate her party with the premiere of the final movie. Failing to find Harry Potter-themed cakes in stores, she requested that another friend and I do our best to bake her birthday cake.

Now, we are about as far as you can get from pros, so we tried to make the task manageable: we decided 30 cupcakes would be easier than a massive cake, and instead of tangling with fondant or chocolate decorations which would have been too time-consuming for the short notice, we went with house-color-themed frostings. Little did we know the suffering that would ensue...

Naked. And then everything went wrong.

Neither of us had worked much with fancy frosting techniques, but we stumbled upon this beautiful post on goodLife {eats} and really, really wanted to try dual-colored frosting for each of the house colors. Between us, we had one large star tip and no pastry bags, so we improvised a bit: we went with ziploc bags with snipped corners, putting the star tip in the larger bag, filling two smaller ziplocs with the colors for each house, and then inserting those smaller bags together into the tip. Of course, given this inexact method and our lack of practice, things did not turn out for the best.

The frosting setup. This was my trial run the night before - we ended up choosing to put the tip inside the outer bag, but you get the idea - I hope?

Our first problem was that we didn't account for the frosting thinning so much after being colored. We were using gel colors, so we thought we could avoid that problem, but those house colors are, for the most part, quite dark, so after hours of stirring drop after drop of gel into bowls of frosting, we were finally satisfied with the shade, but the frosting now needed much more time to chill to get to a pipe-able consistency. In our rush, we started frosting without giving it that time in the fridge - and that is why Ravenclaw looked positively gloppy.

I offer you my sincere apologies, lesser houses of Hogwarts.

Our second problem stemmed simply from lack of practice and materials available. I think these cupcakes might have benefited from an even larger star tip, since fewer spirals might have been more aesthetically pleasing. Nevertheless, our inexperience shows in the asymmetry and irregularity of the frosting...

The last problem, and perhaps the most frustrating one, was trying to get both colors of frosting to come out at equal rates. Half of the time, only one color would emerge, and after shifting the inner ziploc bags a bit, only the other color could be piped. It drove us mad. I definitely think this problem would have been greatly minimized if we had actual pastry bags in varying sizes, given the unique shape of those bags - it just seems like it'd be easier to angle the inner bags then. More practice helped us balance out the frosting ratios, but by the time we'd gotten the hang of it, the damage was done.

Ultimately, I'm more or less satisfied with Gryffindor, the last cupcakes to be frosted, as an amateur birthday cupcake attempt, but the rest... They might remain as powdered sugar-fueled nightmares. The Gryffindor ones went the fastest at the party, but whether that's because they were the best looking cupcakes or because it's the house we all want to be in, I guess I'll never know.

Everyone likes to think they're special. I mean brave.

If you're curious about the cake and frosting recipe we used, we went with Paula Deen's recipe for red velvet cupcakes and cream cheese frosting. I've made them many times before, and let me tell you, that frosting is just about the death of me. Try not to eat it with a spoon! We cut down just a bit on the oil in the cake after making the first batch and added more cocoa powder for flavor, and ultimately, two batches of this recipe gave us 36 cupcakes (we did fill the cups a bit higher than 2/3, though). For my past blog post on these cupcakes, dressed up in a whole 'nother way, click here!