Golf Course Cupcake Cake

My father loves golf.  Most weekends he would be at the golf club playing a round or being a part of the committee and whenever there was a tournament on TV he would be watching it no matter what time of the day or night it was.  As much as he would try to get my brother and I to play as well, which we did a little when we were kids, it wasn’t until I was in high school that a group of my friends would play on a Friday afternoon after school.  A couple of the guys played competitively, but the rest of us were pretty darn average… well probably less than average in all honesty.  But we had fun.

I came across this golf course cupcake cake quite a while ago and pinned it until I had a chance to make it for dad.  As it was his birthday in September, it was about time I made it.

The board I needed was quite large as it had to hold 24 cupcakes so I ended up getting one that was 28″ x 16″ which was more than adequate.  I had grand illusions of covering the entire board with fondant after how good the Father’s Day BBQ Cake ended up looking, but alas I didn’t order enough green fondant.  But I think it worked out alright in the end as I rolled the fondant using The Mat into a shape reminiscent of a golf course.  Totally intentional.

I mixed the remaining dark green fondant for the course with the little bit of leftover lighter green I had from the BBQ cake so I could make a little happy birthday plaque at the bottom of the board with the new imprinter I bought.  I also purchased some golf themed candles to place into the plaque and used a stamp to imprint the phrase into the fondant.

There are three finishes used on the cupcakes.  For the fairway, a Wilton 233 grass tip was used.  For the sand trap crushed biscuit was sprinkled over the icing and for the green, I made some of my own sanding sugar to replicate that manicured look that a golf green has.

Dad’s favourite biscuit is a Scotch Finger so I processed some through my mini food processor and before I dyed the icing green, I smoothed some of the icing onto six of the cupcakes and pressed them into the plate of crushed biscuits.

The remaining icing was coloured with green gel paste and 11 of the cupcakes were covered with the grass.

The remaining seven cupcakes were covered with the green icing and then pressed into a plate of my home made sanding sugar.  It really is quite simple to make and there are a few tutorials floating around the interweb showing you how. By making my own, this also ensured that I had the same colour tone throughout the icing and decoration.   The method I used was to rub some of the gel colouring into caster sugar in a zip lock bag (a lot less messy).  Once completely coloured, you then need to dry it off a little so I placed it into a low temperature oven for 10 minutes.  As it will clump together as it dries, you can use a bench scraper to break the sugar apart and then rub it in a zip lock bag to break it back down into sugar granules.

I printed off a simple flag with the number 18 (but you can use any number that you want) to wrap around a skewer for the green.  The golf ball was a chocolate sixlet which I had bought at Christmas time as I had grand illusions of making some Santa hat cake pops.  Well, maybe this year.

To assemble the cake I first placed the cupcakes onto the course to position them and then stuck them down with some leftover icing.

Once the cakes were stuck, I pushed together some of the icing on each of the cupcakes to get rid of the gaps between the cupcakes.  I then filled them with more biscuits, sanding sugar or piped a little more grass.  This just finished it off a little neater.

Dad really loved the cupcake cake and you can make them any flavour that you like.  For those interested, I used the Ultimate Vanilla Cupcake from The Cupcake Project which was pretty darn tasty so I can understand why it is called the Ultimate cupcake.