Sunflower Cupcakes

As I mentioned last week, we went to Memphis to celebrate Memorial Day.  It was so much fun!  One of my bffs, Courtney, flew in from Florida with her boyfriend.  It was like a mini-reunion (reunited and it feels so good!).  Anyways, Katie (creator of the adorable halloween cupcakes and my 24th birthday cake) made the cutest sunflower cupcakes!  She used Wilton's small leaf tip (#67) to create the sunflower petals. 

Tip: We noticed that the tip really wasn't wide enough to let the icing through, so Katie had to pry it open just a little.

Katie used Martha Stewart's One Bowl Chocolate Cake recipe for the cupcakes, and her grandmother's buttercream icing recipe!  Yum Yum!

After letting the cupcakes cool, ice a small circle in the middle of the cupcake (see above picture)

Dip the cupcake in chocolate sprinkles.

Start icing small petals around the rim, then ice another ring of petals moving inward. (make sense?)

*Sorry the pictures are not great.  My camera was acting funny.

Cupcakes with Buttercream Frosting

When I was making the polka dot birthday cake I knew I would end up with extra icing because would rather make too much than not enough. Luckily I needed to make cupcakes for a meeting I was going to early in the week, so the icing was put to good use! Not only the icing, but I was also able to use the smaller fondant polka dots, too!

The cake was double chocolate - yummy!

I've learned you cannot go wrong with buttercream frosting! Here's recipe:

1 lbs powdered sugar (10x sifted)
1 tablespoons Wilton Meringue powder
1 dashes salt
1 cups white crisco
1 teaspoons Wilton no-color butter flavor
1 teaspoons clear vanilla extract
3-4 tablespoons water

Cream shortening, add butter flavor and vanilla and mix well. Add Meringue powder, sugar, and salt and gradually add water.

Halloween Cupcakes

Ben and I went to see some friends in Memphis for Halloween and the hostess, Katie (yes, the same Katie that made my amazing birthday cake), made the cutest, most delicious Halloween cupcakes. I know this is a little too late for this year's Halloween, but good to have for future ones! Katie got the cupcake design ideas from Martha Stewart (of course) and they turned out great! She made brain, bat, and mummy cupcakes.

We cut the bat wings out of black construction paper and used red hots for the bats' and mummies' eyes.
Katie was such a great hostess! Everything was homemade and looked and tasted great.

Ben and I went as Don and Betty Draper from AMC's Mad Men, Katie was a flapper and her boyfriend, Rob, was Edward Scissorhands (great costumes!)

Now that Halloween is over, it's time to move on to Christmas!!! (oh and Thanksgiving, too.)

Icing Cupcakes

Little Rock's 16th annual Race for the Cure was this past weekend. Did you know Little Rock's RFTC is 4th largest in THE WORLD? Can you believe it? I can't. Over 45,000 people participated in the race this Saturday! It was so much fun!

So going with the pink theme, I made chocolate cupcakes with peppermint patties and pink buttercream icing. I am not the best at icing cupcakes, so I did a little research before starting this time. I found that most people (bloggers) use Wilton's 1M tip and after using it this weekend, I would have to agree. I will admit that my technique probably needs a little practice, but the icing tip is quite amazing.

Here's the recipe for the icing:
1 1/2 lbs powdered sugar (10x sifted)
1 tablespoons Wilton Meringue powder
1 dashes salt
1 1/2 cups white crisco
2 teaspoons Wilton no-color butter flavor
2 teaspoons clear vanilla extract
4 tablespoons water

Cream shortening, add butter flavor and vanilla and mix well. Add Meringue powder, sugar, and salt and gradually add water.

I put a peppermint patty in each cupcake before I baked them. The peppermint patty completely melted and dissolved, adding a slight mint flavor in the cake! Yummy!

Here's a great "How To" tutorial about icing cupcakes.

Caramel Icing with Cupcakes

As a treat/thank you for 1,000 blog hits, I decided to try out a new icing recipe - caramel icing. I love caramel! I made golden vanilla cupcakes, something basic so the icing could be the real star of the cupcake!

Ben suggested that I put mini chocolate chip morsels and caramel in some of the cupcakes before I baked them, just to try it out. I put a dallop of caramel in 4 of the cupcakes and sprinkled some chocolate chip morsels on 4. As you can see from the picture of the cupcakes after they baked, the caramel is no longer visible. It sunk into the cupcake while it was baking and this turned out to be delicious! (again, only if you really like caramel, because it is a lot).

This icing was supposed to be butterscotch-caramel, but I only had caramel at home, so I went with that and it turned out really well!

Here's the recipe for the icing:

Caramel Icing
Yields 2 1/4 cups
Ingredients

• 1/2 cup butter, softened
• 1/3 cup caramel sauce (I used the kind you dip apples in)
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• 1 (16-oz.) package powdered sugar
• 1 - 3 tablespoons milk

Preparation
1. Beat first 4 ingredients at medium speed with electric mixer until creamy.
2. Gradually add powdered sugar, alternating with 1 Tbsp. milk, beating at low sleep until blended and smooth. Beat in up to 2. Tbsp. additional milk for desired consistency.

This is a picture of the icing in a glass bowl. It looks like cake mix, so if you wanted to put food coloring in it I think that would work out nicely.

To ice the cupcakes, I wanted to try something different. Rather than just using a small icing spatula, I put the icing in a bag and used tip #5. As I was icing the cupcakes I made a spiral/swirl motion. I liked this idea, because it is something new to try. However, I would suggest that after you make the icing put it in the refrigerator for 20-30 minutes, because sometimes it was kind of hard to control at room temperature. Thank you for reading my blog and if you ever have any questions, just ask it in the "Comments" section!

St. Patrick's Day Brownie Cupcakes

For St. Patrick's day I made some brownies, but instead of using a rectangle-shaped pan, I put them in a cupcake pan. Once the batter was made, I poured enough so that it would cover 1/4 of each cupcake then I placed a peppermint patty and poured the remaining batter on top. I saw this idea on another website and thought I should try it out because I love mint chocolate flavored desserts (if you couldn't tell by the cake I just made). Since I was baking brownies and not chocolate cake mix in the cupcake pan, it took longer for them to bake (about 25 minutes).

For the icing, I used the same buttercream recipe that I used for the previous post, but this time I put 5 drops of green food coloring. To top it off, I put green sprinkles.

Halloween Cupcakes

For Halloween, I made cupcakes that look like pumpkins. Ben was particularly helpful with these cupcakes. He tried to figure out how to help me make them look exactly like the picture we saw in a magazine, right down to the indentations in the icing to make it look more pumpkin-like (you'll understand what I mean later).

I used chocolate and yellow cake mix for the cupcakes and white icing. To make the icing orange I did a little bit of elementary school thinking...what two colors make orange...red and yellow. So I took the red and yellow food coloring and put 1-2 drops of each into the icing and mixed it. Then added more until I got the orange I wanted.

The picture of Halloween cupcakes I saw had these indentations to make them look more like a pumpkin. The article suggested using toothpicks to make a line in the icing, but this did not work at all. Instead, the toothpick just got covered in icing and totally messed it up. So after a few tries, Ben and I decided to forgo using the toothpicks altogether (how important were indents in the icing, really?).

To finish them off, we put orange-tinted sparkling sugar sprinkles and pretzel sticks. I imagine that the orange sprinkles would be easier to find around Halloween, but I bet if you really needed them then a store like Hobby Lobby or Michael's would have them year-round. The pretzels were the stems and I broke them in half. However, I noticed that the pretzels get soggy after about a day, so I would not suggest eating them. Here's what the cupcakes ended up looking like:

While we're on the theme of Halloween, here's a picture of two jack-o-lanterns Ben and I carved! So cute!

We wanted to go with more traditional-like jack-o-lanterns, can't beat that.