These strawberry patch cupcakes were inspired by Martha Stewart from her Cupcakes book. She recommends using marzipan, however, I had some red and green fondant lying around so that is what I used.
How to make fondant strawberries:
For a dozen cupcakes, I made about 20 strawberries. I found that the cupcakes looked the nicest when there was some variation in size to the strawberry. For the small strawberries, I took pieces of fondant that were about the size of a marble, rolled them into a smooth ball and then gently shaped them into a strawberry shape, elongated with a flatish top and bottom, fatter on one end than the other. For the larger strawberries, I did the same thing, only using a slightly larger ball of fondant.
Next, I poked a bunch of small indentations all over the “berries” with my veining tool to simulate seeds. You don’t want to poke actual holes, just small dimples all over. You are going to be covering the top of the strawberry, so you do not need to worry about indenting the top.
Now it is time to make the strawberry tops. I used a small calyx cutter to make the strawberry tops. Roll out a couple of ounces of green fondant very thin. Cut as many tops as you can, reroll the fondant and repeat until you have enough strawberry tops for all of your berries.
For the larger strawberries, this sized top worked perfectly. I took the top, painted the center with some water, and stuck the top on the berry. I took the points and curled them up so that they looked a bit more like strawberry tops. For the smaller berries, the tops were too big, so I took my exacto knife and trimmed the “leaves” to be shorter. I attached the smaller tops to the smaller berries the same way I did the larger berries.
I let them dry for a few hours and then put them on top of the cupcakes. For the cupcakes, I did a basket weave pattern. Here is a good tutorial about how to pipe basket weave on a cake. I then used a #3 Wilton tip to pipe the strawberry “vines” and a small Wilton leaf tip for the buttercream leaves.
Happy Decorating!