My parents recently celebrated 30 years of marriage.
In honor of this momentous occasion, Mum decided they should have a casual 'gathering' at home. I of course volunteered to take on the planning and catering for this event and have spent a pretty solid seven hours baking today! I had wanted to attempt to re-create a sort of wedding cake for them as a surprise, but quickly realized that all the structural engineering required inside to hold up a 3 tier cake was going to mean spending far more preparation time than I have on my hands. So I opted for cupcakes on a 3 tiered stand instead.
A quick search for "cupcake stand" via Google will give all sorts of useful results... but for mine I used these as my main inspiration:
I purchased 3 cake boards (sm, med, lg) and 4m of pretty ribbon, along with two terracotta flowerpots, some silver wrapping paper and a plastic saucer (the type you put under a flowerpot).
Using my handy scrapbooking glue roller I stuck ribbon round the edges of all three cake boards, and secured the overlapping ends with a pink drawing pin. The saucer is hidden from view under the lowest tier by a band of silver wrapping paper simply secured with tape.
I painted the terracotta pots using silver gloss paint (leftover from painting the radiator in our guestroom!). Apologies for the strange resemblance to a spaceship here (below)!
Using a hot glue gun I stuck the biggest pot to the bottom of the medium cake board, and the smaller pot to the bottom of the smallest cake board.
I then just stacked the boards and pots and hey presto! Simple yet effective cupcake stand.
The bottom two layers were home to some of the 36 cupcakes I baked and iced over the bank holiday. I made plain and lavender cupcakes, some with smooth 'royal' icing and some with butter frosting, all decorated in pastel colours. The top layer was home to a rather tasty fruitcake.
What do you think?
