Poppy Season

In the last few weeks, I seem to be tired all the time. Maybe I have mono. Or maybe I just have modelling madness. I can't believe how consuming it can be, for 6 hours every weekend, we sit down and we stay seated, pressing, pulling, chipping away at little bibs and bobs of plasticene-like gumpaste. I don't think I have ever seen four men so absorbed unless it was playing counterstrike. Which, kinda speaks a lot to the difference between genders.

I digress. What I really wanted to say is, these are the poppies I made, aka, my first class homework. Having eaten or given away all the product, I had to bring in pictures to show 'cher that I actually did any homework at all. Although maybe I should have just showed her my bleary eyes the morning after. So far, Z. has been really patient about me messing up the dining table for this and I have never been so happy to have purchased my eco-green black bug of a vacumn cleaner. Such foresight.


To be honest, I didn't really have enough gumpaste flowers for all these cupcakes. But once I had got the idea of lemon poppy seed cupcakes, filled with lemon curd and piped with buttecream into my mind, I wanted the cupcakes as much as the decoration so off I trundled to my mum's to mess up her kitchen.


First, the cupcakes. I made Martha Stewart's lemon buttermilk pound recipe (one of my favourites) and added poppy seeds. This recipe (which I've posted in the past), makes fairly flat-domed cakes, which really helps. While they were baking, I whipped up a bowl of lemon curd. Then, when they were cooled, I dug out the center of the cupcakes and firmly piped in a big squeeze of curd and put the cupcakes in the fridge to set.


I then piped buttercream in a swirl over the top, covering the curd and topped each with a poppy. Aren't they pretty? The poppies are actually a little too big- I had contemplated icing a cake in pale yellow and arranging the flowers onto it but I didn't want to bother with layering a cake. Still, I think these would be great for a girl's birthday party and I love how you can vary the colours to be shocking and bright, or pastel and fragile.


I forgot to take pictures of it but we packaged each into a clear acrylic plastic canister filled with a nest of shredded yellow paper confetti, tied them with a yellow ribbon bow and gave them out as my dad's birthday favours. Of course, dad being dad couldn't resist playing Santa with a hand-written 'message' to each of his nephews and grandnieces, like "J- Hope you beat me in Maths" and "S- Don't forget to email".