Past Cupcake Creations

I’m feeling a little under the weather (I think finally caught that bug going around the office), so I made myself some chicken soup. But since I already shared my recipe with you, I thought I’d share some of my past cupcake creations pre-blog days.

Bright-colored cupcakes for a summer pool party. I wish I took more pictures of these.

A close-up of the toppers on my summer cupcakes. I made these with sugar, color gels, water, and a cookie cutter!

Just for fun.

For a co-worker’s birthday.

Valentine’s Day 2013.

Halloween 2012

Yellow fondant and mini donuts 🙂

A cupcake golf course

In other cupcake related news, I finally tried a Sprinkles cupcake. It was good, but Crumbs is far superior. Sadly, the Crumbs nearby closed. 😦

I think the cupcake trend may be fading a little bit from the mainstream…but my love for them is just getting started.

Snowflake and Squirrel Cookies

I have a confession to make. I tried to save time on my Christmas cookies by using premade sugar cookie dough. They tasted good but they didn’t hold their shape and the royal icing wasn’t the right consistency.

Mistakes happen, sure. But I should have stuck with the recipe from scratch that I knew would work. There’s no time for experimentation on Christmas Eve!

Besides, I went to the trouble of buying little jars to put them in. It was going to be such a cute gift.

My sister’s gluten free chocolate chip cookies were also from a premade dough but those turned out great.

Then I made the mistake of putting bread in the jar to keep the cookies moist. After all that effort not to contaminate! 😦 At least my brother in law ate them. I think.

It really ate at me that I couldn’t replicate the success I had with my Morrocan cookies. I needed to redeem myself. I needed to know that wasn’t some kind of fluke. Most importantly, I needed to know how to make them from now on.

I used the same rolled cookie recipe from the Morrocan cookie post (from Make Bake Celebrate). Then I used Wilton’s royal icing mix to make the frosting. I still had to adjust it to get the right consistency and dye it.

Rolled Cookie Ingredients:
3 cups flour
1 TSP baking powder
1 cup unsalted butter
1 cup sugar
1 large egg
1 TSP vanilla extract

I don’t own a KitchenAid, so I just used a regular old hand mixer to make my batter. Detailed instructions and photos are here

 

Here’s some of the most important things I learned:

1. Let your egg and butter get to room temperature before making the batter. This really does matter.

2. Once the dough is made, put it in the fridge for 20 minutes before rolling it out.

3. Once you’ve cut out your shape, freeze your cookies for 2-5 minutes. This helps the cookie hold its shape. (Note: this doesn’t work with Pillsbury premade dough)

4. When using Wilton’s royal icing mix, add one tbsp of water at a time. It’s easy to add more water, hard to extract it. The consistency best for decorating with the condiment bottles is similar to Elmer’s glue. Thick but fluid.

5. Be patient. Cookie decorating is a multi-step process with lots of waiting in between.

Joy to the World – Christmas Cupcakes

The annual family Christmas party is hours away. It’s a tradition I always look forward to. A mixture of family and friends of all ages come to together to eat, drink, and celebrate. It’s a good time.

Last year the party was on a Saturday with plenty of time to prepare all the glorious food. This year the party is on a Friday night, so the food is being catered. But even if it meant losing sleep I had to make something! So I made cupcakes. Chocolate with vanilla buttercream frosting.

Pretty happy with the final results:

Mini Christmas Cupcakes

When I woke up this morning, there were 3 things I wanted to do. Cupcake making won out. Baking usually takes priority even if it shouldn’t.

Today called for triple chocolate cupcakes. I made them from a box, but replaced the oil with melted butter and mixed in a little whipping cream along with the water.

As usual, I was anxious to get to the decorating. In the spirit of the Christmas season, I decided to go for the classic red, green, and white combination. The only problem was that I didn’t have any green or red gels.

Since I did have red and green sprinkles, a decorating idea quickly emerged.

I started by making a circle of buttercream around the edge of the mini cupcake.

Then I gently rolled it in sprinkles.

Which looked like this.

Then I topped it with a little spiral of buttercream.

I had a lot of fun experimenting with different piping techniques.

Before I could even finish baking, my boyfriend came floating in the kitchen and snatched up a couple of the tinest cupcakes. Glad to have his seal of approval. 🙂