One Direction Cake and Cupcakes

By lovinghomemade on October 4, 2014 • ( 3 )

One Direction Cupcakes

I guess it was really just a matter of time before one of my friends asked me to make a One Direction cake and cupcakes for their daughter. Cake for the party and cupcakes for the party bag. You can never have too much cake!

While I would love to say I considered modelling figures of Niall, Harry, Zayn, Louis and Liam, I have to admit that novelty cakes are really not my speciality. Instead I worked around their colours and logo and tried to create something that would appeal to 7 year old Abby and her friends.

One Direction Cake

I ordered rice paper cupcake toppers online for the cupcakes and used red, black and white sugarpaste to make the decorations for the cake. Rice paper toppers are a great idea because the possibilities for the message or picture you put on them are endless. We chose the very simple I♥1D, which looks very ’80s to me and is probably why I like it. I rolled out some white sugarpaste, positioned the toppers and then rolled over them all very gently. That gives you a slight indent for the rice paper to sit in. Then I stuck the toppers onto the sugarpaste using a tiny amount of water. Too much water and they will dissolve. I cut out sugarpaste circles with a pastry cutter:

Making the toppers

I also used red, white and black sugarpaste to make bows and stars for the cake and its topper. It’s a good idea to make all the decorations a couple of days in advance to give them time to dry out properly. I added tylo powder to the cake decorations to help them harden.

Toppers

Once you have made your decorations it’s just a case of making your favourite cake or cupcake recipe and assembling them. I made Abby’s cupcakes in vanilla sponge and her cake in chocolate sponge. I baked Abby’s cupcakes in red metallic cases and put a thin layer of vanilla buttercream on the top to stick the topper on. A piped swirl of buttercream around the edge with some red sprinkles and glitter finish off the look.

A layer of buttercream…

And a topper…

Cupcakes!

The first batch of vanilla cupcakes didn’t make it out of the house because still not being entirely used to my new oven I decided to set it lower than I would normally. I thought I had put it on 160ºC but when the cupcakes still weren’t baked after about half an hour I realised I had set the oven to 110ºC by mistake. Luckily they tasted good when they were finally done but I made some more for Abby! Abby’s cake was a 9″ square chocolate sponge and while I did manage to set the oven to the proper temperature I had to make use of the potato peeler on the edges again…

I levelled the cake and cut it into two layers, filled it with chocolate buttercream and used some white sugarpaste to square off the base.

I used vanilla buttercream to mask the cake as I was using white sugarpaste, just in case chocolate buttercream showed through. I decorated the cake in the style of a present and then added the One Direction decorations. I found their logo online and cut it out freehand: I thought it was going to be really difficult but luckily it turned out to be fairly easy.

One Direction decorations

I’m sure Abby would have liked a visit from the boys of One Direction for her birthday but hopefully the cake and cupcakes were a welcome subsitute. Happy 7th Birthday Abby!