Cake – How to make cupcakes lighter

Many frostings incorporate more than butter as the fat in the icing. I recently made ones using shortening, coconut butter, and coconut milk solids. These three are all fats that have higher melting points and are more reliable at higher temperatures in comparison to butter.

If you wish to retain as much of the butter mouthfeel as possible, you might consider switching to a buttercream mixture that splices in shortening or even margarine as both are more workable at room temperature. You might also try some of the other variations on buttercream.

Best practices for icing or frosting in any case are all over the web;

• This extensive article has a real gem to be wary of; keep the butter around 65-70 to ensure you aren't dipping too low or hot. There's plenty of additional information and a listing of strengths and weaknesses of the varieties.
• Here is a run-down of how to frost the cake itself.

• As alluded to in the comments, don't put meltable frosting/icing on a hot cake.
• If you are going to keep the frosting in the heat and sunlight, you are definitely going to want to add some shortening or coconut butter in there; that's why it's called Decorator's icing, they put shortening in it so it can hang out at summer weddings.

We used to make "display bread" using salt dough. Basically you add as much salt as flour (eg. 3 cups) to make it uninteresting for bacteria. To make the end result hard enough to last, you can add either hot water and a little oil or cold water and a spoon of wallpaper glue. Add as much water as necessary to form a bread like dough. Add anything (eg curry, blueberry sirup, ink instead of water - anything goes since you are not going to eat the result!) to color (parts of) your dough. Wholemeal instead of white flour will give you a stone or concrete like color. Do not use yeast or anything else that will change the shape of your dough. Yeast probably will not work in all that salt anyway.

Then shape your cakes and let the result dry for a day before baking it. Not in direct sunlight (it might dry too fast and crack).

To see some results, search for "Salzteig" on German Google Image search. :-)