I love the bubbly...

I've wanted to make Champagne Cupcakes for awhile now and finally mustered up the courage to do it.  Pink Champagne Cupcakes with Pink Buttercream Frosting. Mmmm.  I was nervous about the recipe, it required whipping egg whites to stiff peaks...a task i am truly afraid of...anything involving extra care with egg whites always makes me nervous. The recipe is borrowed from The Baking Robot.  

So Pretty.

Mood lighting.

Done and ready to be brought to work tomorrow...Everyone loves Cupcake Mondays!

St. Patrick's Day

Happy St. Patrick's Day! I have been anxiously awaiting St. Patrick's Day so that I use some tiny shamrock sprinkles...for our office St. Patrick's Day Lunch I made Chocolate Cupcakes with MINT Buttercream Frosting.  As a lover of all things peppermint, I was pretty excited.  Thankfully I used all but a tiny teaspoon of the frosting on the cupcakes because if there was anymore left over, I surely would have found myself on the couch eating a bowl of frosting.  I used Wilton grass cupcake liners and made the cutest cupcake picks courtesy of The Tomkat Studio blog.  

Seriously, how cute are these Shamrocks?

Tada! Done and ready to eat at work.

Wedding Bells and Flower Cupcakes...

Well I successfully made it through my first ever wedding and wow was it crazy.  A total of 120 cupcakes and 1 "small" carrot cake for the bride and groom Megan and Jesse.  Half chocolate cupcakes and half yellow buttermilk with buttercream frosting.  i am literally sore today from what i assume is a combination of decorating 120 cupcakes as flowers and shredding 1 lb of carrots.  Really, i stapled something at work this morning and wanted to cry...i might have even yelped a little.  On that note, i shredded them by hand because i FORGOT that i have a very lovely KitchenAid Food Processor that would have done the trick in a matter of seconds.  Who forgets that? I guess since it's not on the counter i don't think about it. Speaking of KitchenAid appliances, what did people do before the KitchenAid stand up mixer? Really.  Anyway, I'm pretty exhausted so here are the photos.  There aren't many because Saturday was a mad dash to get everything done in time and get to the wedding not covered in sugar and food coloring.  

Flowers!

There they are in all their glory.

Congratulations Megan and Jesse! I am so glad I was able to be a part of your day!

Making Strides...My Month of Baking

Whew...October went fast.  It was a whirlwind of baking and I honestly don't even remember everything that i made, besides cinnamon rolls....from scratch.  If you've never made them from scratch, here's a word of warning...they literally take between 3 and 4 hours from start to finish.  You should not start them at 7:00pm on a Sunday and expect to start your week off well slept.  They didn't sell in my bake sale as fast as i expected, so i imagine they weren't as sticky/gooey as they were supposed to be...In any event, we raised a lot of money towards Making Strides Against Breast cancer and The American Cancer Society and it felt good but was rather exhausting to put together delicious baked goods on Mondays and Fridays.  

For Halloween i made a fun new recipe for the pumpkin lovers of the world...Chocolate Pumpkin Cupcakes with Pumpkin Buttercream Frosting!  I got my inspiration and recipes from the i am baker blog, which i love! These were SO very easy to make.  My husband said they weren't quite "pumpkiny" enough.  Next time i will review the recipe for pumpkin pie and add some other spices into the recipe to bring out the pumpkin flavor.

  

Chocolate Pumpkin Cupcakes with Pumpkin Buttercream

If i make them again, i will make more frosting, because i barely had enough for 24 cupcakes and the proportion of frosting didn't look right for the cupcakes.

And a tiny chocolate covered sunflower seed to add an extra hint of fall.

It's almost...you guessed it...Sugar Cookie Season.  But first...Thanksgiving.  i am pretty sure that i will be making these cupcakes again for Thanksgiving and just giving them some extra Pumpkin-Oomph.  

Shiny Happy Chocolate Cupcakes

For a coworker's birthday I made her favorite flavor combo...the ever popular, Chocolate Cupcake with Chocolate Frosting!  I am sad to report that i cheated and used cupcake mix but happy that i tried a new frosting recipe.  I made a chocolate frosting that called for an entire POUND of chocolate chips and promised to have a nice sheen to it.  

 A little abstract...

 Shiny goodness...

So rich my husband could only eat one.

On another note of baked love...the weekend before i made good ol' fashioned Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookies for my grandfather.  It felt awesome to send them off to him since i haven't seen him or my grandmother in (eek) more than 2 years.  

I am currently waiting for dough to rise for Cinnamon Bums that i'm making for a fundraiser at work tomorrow!

Sugar, egg whites and air bubbles...oh my

I should start by saying that although i am extremely disappointed in yesterdays baking adventure, it wasn't really a total bust.  I guess i just set my standards too high this week.  i had been thinking about baking all last week, felt like i was in some sort of funk and needed to use the other side of my brain to get out some creative energy.  I tried a new frosting recipe, courtesy of Martha's Cupcake book.  Swiss Meringue Butter cream.  Far more involved than my regular butter cream, but i didn't back down.  And i think i did it right, took about 30 minutes or so to make, versus my regular butter cream which is about 5.  Texture and consistency were good.  Problem is, i have never had it before and don't actually like the flavor, it's too rich for me.  And of course, even though i followed the last step to remove the air bubbles, there are still bubbles. GAH!  

I am practicing making flower cupcakes for a wedding i am doing in march.  I think i will try these flowers again with a different frosting recipe and different colors.  Not just a sea of pink.  I am actually pretty happy with the way the flowers turned out for my first time.  

I think with a stiffer frosting, these will be really cool, the Meringue Butter cream was too soft i think.  

I also made some mini cakes and thanks to a cake leveler they were level and my first coat of frosting went on ok.  My regular butter cream failed though.  It separated and kept melting and was just a mess.  The flower petals didn't form the way i wanted to, so i wound up just playing with different tips to see what would happen.  Not my best baking day, but i will try again soon.  

Baking Weekend...

Because Sean was in Ocala this weekend, I opted for some uninterrupted baking time.  I've been wanting to make some cookies for some time now and try out some chocolate cupcakes.  I decided on White Chocolate Chip, Cranberry and Macadamia Nut cookies and Chocolate Cupcakes with Peanut Butter Frosting.  

The cookies turned out great!  They are almost as good as the cookies my college roommates Mom used to make for us.  I think hers had some granola and maybe regular chocolate chips in them.  We called them Crack Cookies.  They were fabulous.  The only flaw to these cookies was my own fault, I did not line the cookie sheet with parchment paper, like the recipe suggested and wound up needing to strategically scoop the dough, so that the cranberries weren't on the bottom, because they got all burnt on the first sheet.  Next time, I will use the parchment paper.  

White Chocolate Chip, Cranberry and Macadamia Nut Cookies

I loved the Peanut Butter Frosting I made for Sean's birthday so much that I wanted to try it with Chocolate Cupcakes.  It turned out just as fabulously fluffy as before.  The cupcakes are pretty good, maybe not as moist as I was hoping, but the frosting balances that out.  

Chocolate Cupcakes with Peanut Butter Frosting 

I made SO many cupcakes it is silly.  I decided to double the recipe, because for some reason, I thought one batch would only make 12 cupcakes.  Needless to say, there are 60 cupcakes in my kitchen right now. AND 40 or so cookies.  What was I thinking?