Our Attempt at Celebrating World Baking Day

Happy World Baking Day! To celebrate this sweet holiday we here at Overcup Press where inspired to make some tasty treats. With our newest book set to be released on June 1st we thought, what's better than blue cupcakes with drawings of the Tilikum Crossing? So three of us gathered on a Wednesday afternoon to attempt our vision.

As none of us have much experience in baking or decorating we started off with a boxed cake mix and some blue food coloring. We kept adding more food coloring in an attempt to make the cupcakes a dark blue. Approximately half a bottle later we realized it wasn’t gonna happen and so we stuck them in the oven hoping they would get a little darker as they baked.  

Upon taking them out of the over we were a little worried our vision was ruined since the cupcakes were more on the golden brown side instead of the vibrant blue we were going for. Though I think we can all agree that would have been a slightly more accurate representation of the Willamette river. After some discussion we decided to cut off the tops which revealed the bright blue of the cupcake.

At this point we’re just going with the flow and trying to see what would work, our original plan having been lost along the way. So we arrange our blue cupcakes into a kind of canvas and just start decorating.

The mini cupcakes, which we made with different intentions, ended up becoming one half of the Tilikum Crossing. The orange frosting, which matches our book cover, ended up outlining the mini cupcakes so that they wouldn't just look like a triangle. At the end of all this we were left with several extra cupcake bits so we just kinda had fun with it.

This one (originally a test run on drawing the Tilikum Crossing in orange frosting) turned out so cute we added bits of leftover cupcakes to create the water. And of course we just had to use our blue glitter frosting!

Lastly we have this masterpiece, which if you couldn’t already tell was made out of the cupcake tops we cut off. The white frosting was meant to be waves but let's just agree to call them clouds.

We had a lot of fun with our baking day project and even though I don’t think we’ll be opening up a bakery any time soon they still tasted amazing. So don’t worry about how pretty your baking experiments go and just enjoy the process, and definitely enjoy the taste testing!

Tilikum Crossing, Bridge of the People: Portland's Bridges and a New Icon officially pubs in two weeks! And a special package is dropping this week, which includes a print of one of architect and author Donald MacDonald's original illustrations. 

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