But for now, I’d like to explain my seemingly contradictory passion for cupcakes, in the midst of my passion for healthy living……
Your cupcake ingredients are not always going to be the best for you.
You can choose to use the best of ingredients in your cupcakes – organic wholemeal flour, organic milk, organic butter, pure natural vanilla, and maybe even substitute apple juice concentrate or Xylitol (natural sweetener) for sugar – but you can’t escape the decorating dilemma! That is, no matter how hard you try, even the most clever of “cupcake scientists” would have trouble finding a replacement for icing sugar.
Icing sugar, as I’ve learned over the last few weeks and observed in every cake shop window, is to a cake decorator what diamonds are to a jeweller. No matter that it’s highly refined and pulverised into an unhealthy concoction….it’s precious and irreplaceable!
We all know that any food that has been chemically processed, altered from its original state and transformed into an unnatural creation is not the best for you. In fact, since being diagnosed with cancer, I’ve been doing so much reading about nutrition, that I am convinced of the necessity of eating mostly natural and organic foods for optimum health. I often ask myself things like, “Did that chocolate bar come out of the ground like that?”…..and then I have a little conversation with myself….“No, but the strawberries did”….so I eat the strawberries instead of the chocolate. A crazy conversation maybe, but a very clever food choice!
So why do I love making cupcakes and doing my cake decorating course so much when I know how bad sugar is for me? I know refined sugar raises insulin levels in the blood, which can lead to weight gain and depressed immunity, which of course can lead to many terrible illnesses, cancer being just one of them. I know that the ancient Greek Physician, Hippocrates said, “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food”. I know there is a whole body of scientific evidence to prove that this is serious stuff – too much sugar is not good for you!
But having said that, I’d like to share something my Mum used to tell me when it comes to food…..“everything in moderation”. I’m actually the baby of 10 (yes, ten!!) children and my Mum never wanted us kids growing up feeling like we missed out on anything. So although we ate home cooked meals most of the time, as Dad (the sole breadwinner) couldn’t afford to take us all out for dinner obviously, we were allowed to have special treats here and there.
I loved my Mum’s entertaining anecdotes of homes where food was served with an “iron fist”, but as soon as those kids visited another home (where their parent wasn’t in control anymore), they would go wild. I can just picture the absolute “junk-fest” that ensued– puffy cheeks full of lollies, gooey chocolate fingers all over furniture, sweet crumbs blazing a trail behind the little munchkins! Very embarrassing for the parent, no doubt! Now that I’m a mum, I completely understand why Mum never wanted us kids to be involved in such a sticky scene!
Admittedly, I do draw the line at buying sugar-laden soft drinks or any food or drink that is artificially sweetened – and I don’t care if my kids think I’m neurotic when it comes to this, as I feel very strongly about it. I don’t like greasy fried foods either and even though my kids have had take-away foods, we’ve got them used to healthier versions like Thai ….Yum! However, much like my mum did long ago, I decided that as long as I feed my kids healthy foods 99% of the time, a cupcake lovingly handcrafted by mum now and then, or a sweet treat of some kind, is not going to hurt them.
In life, too much of anything is not good for you. Too much sun, too much work, too much food, too much make-up…you get the idea. Therefore, I simply try to do my very best to live a natural and healthy life, in an imperfect and human-effected world. I do the best I can most of the time – after all, you don’t want to get me started on the adverse effects of negativity and stress on a person’s health! I’ll save that for another time.
And the Spakfilla (haha, not really – for all those people who’ve never done a home renovation, the icing was used to fill any holes, the same way a painter fills holes with Spakfilla before painting a wall): 
I thought it’d look pretty in pink (so I added a tiny dollop of pink colouring paste and kept kneading until the icing was a beautiful blushing pink):
The teacher made the technique of placing the icing on the cake look a bit like laying a tablecloth on a table, but it was definitely not that easy. It turned out pretty neat for my first time though:
Of course, I had to make things more complicated by choosing to put an additional icing top on my cake, to make it look a little more ornate:
I had to start preparing the ribbon for next week. It had to be done in advance, so that the icing has time to harden before going on the cake. More kneading and rolling:
And with a brush of water and a snip of the scissors, the pieces of my ribbon were constructed like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle:
Below is how I left my cake…..until next week!!
