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The good news is that I think I managed to get more filling into the cupcakes this time, and that I think the ganache layer should be thicker.

The bad news is that I suck at royal icing. Last time, it was slightly too runny and oozed too much. This time, I made it so thick I couldn’t pipe it at all, and the plastic bags I used instead of an actual, real piping bag kept bursting. I was afraid that, if I started to thin it out, I’d overcompensate and wind up with gooey icing again.

I thought I’d be brilliant and make it even thicker, then, to a consistency kind of like marzipan, and make little cutouts to lay atop the cupcakes. Obviously, if you know me at all, you are now snickering at my foolish optimism, because improv like this rarely works out as well as I think it will. The cutouts stuck to the parchment on which I’d rolled and cut them, stretching and tearing, so I wound up just cutting strips as thin as I could with a pizza cutter and sticking them randomly to the ganache, as here:

This, as you can see, does not quite have the desired effect. In fact, they look so preposterous, I’m afraid to put them up on Flickr, lest people run away in terror.

I’m hoping that, if I don’t tell anyone who doesn’t read this blog exactly how the cupcakes are supposed to look, then one or two of them might be fooled into thinking it was intentional. “The random strips of icing are supposed to evoke kanji in the abstract, you see — not the meaning, but the emotion behind the kanji.” Or something. Yeah, that’s it.

I swear, I used to be able to make royal icing when I was a teenager. Must’ve lost the knack.