Chocolate cupcakes with vanilla buttercream and candied pansies

Purple perfection.

Mmmmm cupcakes. 

These would have been an ordinary batch of cupcakes except that I stole 13 pansies from next door and proceeded to candy them. 

This process is fairly straightforward. You mix egg whites with icing sugar and paint it on. You're supposed to leave them to dry overnight but I am far too impatient for that and put them on the cupcakes as soon as they were iced. 

Pansies drying in the sun. The excess sugar is eventually absorbed into the flowers. 

They didn't taste like much that day, but the next day they were quite crisp and sugary. They're really more of an aesthetic addition to the cupcakes, but there's nothing wrong with that.

Apparently you can keep candied flowers for up to a year in a sealed container. However, these ones didn't last too long. (I usually store cupcakes in a plastic container with the lid slightly open.)

I'm rather excited about my new gel food colourings too. This buttercream was actually quite purple, which the camera didn't quite pick up accurately. 

Pretttty!

Eat me!