Design Practice: Typogateaux 2011

I had some fun with this brief! My main and initial concept was after going through my options of what typeface I could use, i thought if I used Futura then I could base my design on the Red Bull logo, this idea was re enforced by the fact my sister has recently discovered a recipe of 'Red Velvet Cupcakes'. The colour of these cup cakes was absoloutly amazing, I have never seen any food like it,

They are a constant deep red which I then discovered was in fact my favorite colour. All these reasons confirmed my decisions. Also if i went with the Red Bull theme, I wanted to adjust Red Bull's slogan of 'Red Bull gives you wings' to 'Red Bun gives you wind'. Considering the light heartedness of the brief I thought it would be fitting to add a little comedy.

Due to lack of funds, and difficulty in finding specific required ingredients then I had to re think my strategy, so I decided to focus on making some plain cupcakes while trying to re create the colour of the original cupcakes.

I got the recipe off THIS WEBSITE minus the ice cream, adding red food colouring and cocoa powder.

250g (8oz) unsalted butter, softened
250g (8oz) caster sugar
250g (8oz) self-raising flour
Pinch of salt
4 medium eggs
4 tablespoons milk
2 x 12-hole muffin tins, lined with paper cases

The redness of the buns was not quite how it was in the original cupcakes but it was as close as I could get.

They ended up a little lighter than expected but to be honest I was pretty happy with the result, taste tests were done by my flat mates and I got a thumbs up from them. calving the buns was a little bit of a problem, as they were quite delicate and tended to have pieces flake off the edge if cut in the incorrect way, I found the best tool to use was a bread knife using a sawing motion.

Through trial and error, I decided the best way was to cut the top of the cup cake off tto create a level surface, and then try to sculpt each letter using the templates I had printed off.

This was the final result of the calved buns, I decided not to cut out the counters or bowls of the letters as this
1.may have caused the buns to crumble and loose their shape
2. I actually quite liked the solidity of not including the counters

I made butter icing, mostly down to the fact that it tastes amazing and my flat mates agreed the butter icing compliments the buns.
I originally wanted to make the icing red as well but unfortunately I used all my food colouring in the cupcake mixture.
I think I preferred the design without the icing, I believe this would have been different if I had made the icing red but they did taste very nice.