 Hi I'm Janice Hall with the Alabama Extension. Today we're going to be learning how to decorate cupcakes. We're going to learn how to do emoji cupcakes, swirl cupcakes with sprinkles, and I'm going to show you how to make a rose out of fondant. But before we start, we're going to learn a little bit about food safety and how you can start a business at home. So let's talk about some food safety tips. So some people would say, why food safety? Well, you don't want to make anyone sick from any food that you prepare. So there are a few things that you can put into practice to help prevent that from happening. The first thing is you want to make sure that you wash your hands. Wash your hands with soap and water for at least 20 seconds. And some people like to sing a happy birthday song or twinkle twinkle little star. Make sure that you're using a paper towel to dry your hands. That way you don't contaminate them. One other tip that I like to use when preparing foods that are ready to eat like our delicious cupcakes are to wear gloves. So we're going to be practicing that today. And lastly, I know it's hard. That icing smells delicious and we get so tempted to try to taste it. But try to resist that because if you're licking your fingers and then you're touching a cupcake, you could be contaminated at that cupcake or that other food that you're preparing with your salava. So make sure that you are practicing those tips. Now there's one other thing I want to tell you about and it's the Alabama Cottage Food Law. It was put into place about six years ago and it allows people to bake and sell cakes, candy, cookies, things like that from your home. You can make up to $20,000 by starting in that home business under the Alabama Cottage Food Law. If you're interested, go to our website at aces.edu slash go slash cottage food business for more information. Okay, now it's time to have some fun. We're going to start with our first cupcake. It's going to be a happy face emoji cupcake. So to decorate our cupcakes you need cupcakes and icing and fondant. Now what is fondant? Fondant is an elastic type of icing that you can actually roll out and sculpt and cut and make all kinds of shapes. And it's going to be so easy to do this. So let's get started. Okay, now notice that I've already put my gloves on to kind of remember that's very important when you're handling food that is ready to eat. And then I have a cutting board. The cutting board I've covered with pressing seal and you can also use plastic wrap, saran wrap, just to give it an extra layer of protection. So here we have our fondant. You want to work your fondant to kind of get it nice and elastic so you can see how it's nice and stretchy. And this tastes really good. This one, this flavor is vanilla. So this tastes really good. Now if your fondant feels a little bit sticky, you can take a little bit of powdered sugar or corn starch and rub it on the surface in order to keep it from sticking. Then you're going to take your rolling pin and you're going to roll your fondant out like this. Now you want to make sure that you roll it to be at least about an eighth of an inch thick. Okay, now that's big enough. You can see it's not that thick. It's just thick enough so that you can cover your cupcake. Now you're going to cut a circle to start with your emoji happy face. So we're going to use this dessert cup in order to cut the circle. Now we have a nice round circle. Now how do you get the fondant to stick to the cupcake? You're going to just take a little bit of icing and you're going to put it on that cupcake. And you're going to take yellow fondant and place it on top like that. Now the next step is to make our happy face. So what you want to do, always remember when you're not working with your fondant to take the leftover fondant and put it back in a bag so that you can keep it nice and elastic because it will dry out if you leave it out in the air for a long period of time. So now we're going to take our black fondant and we're going to work it a little bit to kind of get it elastic. And then we're going to take our rolling pin and we're going to roll about an eighth of an inch thick, roll our fondant out, pick it up, adjust it. Then you want to take it kind of smooth it out a little bit. You may have a few wrinkles so you can kind of take your hands and smooth it. And then using your circle cutter, this is a tip, but you can use this end as a circle. You're going to cut, you can take your finger and pop it out. Then you're going to cut another circle. That one stayed and that's fine. So you want to take these and you're going to just place them on the cupcake like this. So now we have our eyes and I'll show you how to make them stick. I like to put mine in position and then go back and glue them down as we would say. Now to do the mouth, we're going to smooth it out to kind of get those wrinkles out. We're going to take the other part of our circle cutter and we're going to cut a circle. So now we have our circle but we want to make a little happy face. So we're going to take this part of our tip and we're going to cut kind of a crescent out of that to make the happy face. Pick up your little happy face and put it on there like that. You can kind of tuck it a little bit and play with it to get it to look the way you want to. And now you've already made a happy face emoji cupcake. Now to get the happy face to stick to the fondant, we're going to take a little bit of water. Just a little, you don't want a lot but just a little bit and you're going to just stick those decorations back on that cupcake. Now they won't fall off. Now let's take a look at our next cupcake. This is going to be our heart emoji cupcake. Again you're going to take your fondant, you're going to work it, take you a little bit of icing, spread it on that cupcake and now we're going to roll our fondant out. So again you're going to roll it about an eighth of an inch thick, big enough so that you can cut a circle out of it. Okay, take your dessert cup and we're going to cut our circle and then we're going to take our cupcake, take that fondant and lay it on top like so. Okay, then the leftover fondant you want to take it and place it back in the bag to keep it from drying out. Now to do our hearts that's going to be super easy. Let's set that to the side and we're going to get our red fondant and we're going to roll out about an eighth of an inch. Then we're going to take our heart cutter and we're going to cut our hearts out. Now sometimes I like to use a toothpick to pick up those hearts or any decoration. We're putting a little bit of water on our fondant. We're going to take our little hearts and place them on the cupcake like so. Kind of position them so we got our hearts. Now we need to do the smile. So let's take our black fondant. Let's put our red back in the bag and get our black fondant. We're going to roll it out just like we did for our happy face emoji cupcake. We're going to take our circle cutter and we're going to cut that circle. Sometimes you have to peel it out of there and again you're going to take that front part of that cutter and you're going to cut your little smile off. Sometimes you can kind of clip the edges just a little bit and you have your happy face heart emoji. Now we're going to make a rose to go on the top of our cupcake and we're going to be making a pink rose. Of course you can make any color that you like but we're going to use pink fondant today. So you want to take your fondant and you want to roll it out. Now when making flowers you want to try to get your fondant as thin as possible to start because the thinner it is the more realistic it looks. You're going to cut out nine circles. Of course if you want it to be bigger you can just cut out more circles. Now we're going to start by just rolling our fondant out and then cutting out our circles. That one's trying to get away. So we've got nine circles cut. We're going to take our excess fondant and we're going to put it back in the bag. Now we have circles but we want to get those circles as thin as we possibly can. So you can take a plastic bag or you can use wax paper whatever you have at home. I've taken a bag, a gallon size bag and I just cut the ends off to kind of open it up. And I'm going to take those fondant circles and place them inside the bag. You can make a rose so many different ways. This is an easy way that I've learned to do it. But whatever works for you is absolutely fine. Kind of spread them out a little bit so you'll have a little room. And then we're going to close it down like this. And then now we're going to use our thumb to smooth out those edges so you can take your thumb and just kind of smooth out those edges a little bit. Try to get it as thin as you can. Now the reason for using a plastic bag is to keep the fondant from sticking. It's an easy way to kind of smooth out. Now they have all kinds of fondant tools that you can use to do this. But I can just use my finger. You can see how the circles are getting a little bit bigger as you smooth them out. Which means your rose, you're making rose petals right now. So you just kind of keep going. Just kind of smooth it out with your thumb. You got to press down a little hard too to kind of get it to smooth out for you. Awesome. So now we're going to take those open the bag up. Now we're going to take each one of those petals. We're going to start first by making the rose bud. So you're going to take that first petal and you're going to just wrap it around. Try to get it as tight as you can. Okay. Now you're going to take that next petal and starting right here. You're going to wrap that petal around that first rose bud. Then you take that next circle. Starting about a third of the way back. You're going to wrap it around. And you just keep going with those petals. Take your next one and then just wrap it. Come about a third of the way back and wrap it around. Now don't worry about the bottom getting really thick. Because it will, you can pinch that off and use that excess funding to make another rose. Come in a third of the way and you're going to wrap that petal around like that. And just keep going. Come back a third of the way and wrap that next petal. You can kind of fan it out a little bit if you need to. Feel like you got to kind of play with it. Then you take that next petal and third of the way and wrap it. And then take that next petal. Find the thinnest part. Come around and you're going to wrap it again. And the last petal. You're going to take that last circle and you're going to wrap it around like that. And then kind of fluff it out a little bit to make it look realistic. And you have a rose that was made out of circles. How cool is that? Now the bottom is really big. So guess what? I just take it and pinch the bottom off like that. You've got your beautiful little rose. Kind of bend your petals like this to make them look a little more realistic. That's your rose. Now I'm going to show you how to put it on the cupcake. Now to prepare our cupcake to put our rose we're going to cut a white circle so that that pink can show up really nicely. So we're just going to take some white fondant. Roll it out big enough to cut a circle. It's a little bit sticky. So I'm just going to take a little corn of powdered sugar or you can use corn starch. Take your dessert cup. Cut your circle just like we did with our emojis. And then preparing our cupcake we're going to take a little bit of icing. Put it on the cupcake to get that fondant to stick. And then place our white fondant on the cupcake. Now to get our fondant rose to stick to our cupcake we're just going to take a little bit of water and place it on the cupcake like this. And you have your rose cupcake just like that. So the last cupcake that we're going to learn how to do is a swirl cupcake using icing. And to do that you'll need a pastry bag, a star tip. Now a star tip they're all different kinds made by different companies but a star tip basically has these little spikes on it. And when you squeeze the icing out it makes a design. So I'm going to show you how to do that. And we're going to do a couple of designs using this star tip. To prepare your bag you want to take your bag and then drop your tip in the bag. And then you want to push it down as much as you can until it stops. And then you want to mark it off about right there at the end of that little triangle. So you want to put a little mark and then you want to push it up so that you'll know exactly where to cut that bag. If you cut it too far down your tip will go straight through the bag and you don't want that to happen. So that's how you get your tip inside the bag. Now this is a little trick that may help you. So you take that cup and then you're going to take your icing and put it in the cup inside the bag. This kind of helps to keep your bag nice and clean and we're good to go. So now we're going to take that bag, pull it out of the cup and press that icing down. Let's move the glass out of the way. So you're going to just squeeze that icing down and then you're going to twist the bag at the top to keep the icing from coming out when you start to squeeze and decorate your cupcake. To do a swirl. Let's get our cupcake and then we're going to start from the outside and we're going to squeeze and swirl the icing around until we come to the middle of the cupcake. So let's start from the outside and we're going to squeeze and wrap and then squeeze and build on top and then continue and then you get to the top, you stop squeezing and you pull away and you have your swirl cupcake. Now to finish it off, sprinkles are so much fun. So we're just going to dab it with some sprinkles and they're all over the table. And then we have our swirl cupcake. So today we've learned how to make emoji cupcakes. We learned how to make a rose on a cupcake and how to swirl icing on a cupcake. Now some of you signed up to get a cupcake kit. If you did, you will have all of the tools that you need to make the cupcakes that we made today. If you were not able to sign up to get a cupcake kit, it's okay. You can go to your local craft store or department store and buy all of the supplies that you would need to create these decorations that we did today. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact your local extension office or visit our website at www.aces.edu.