Happy Administrative Assistant's Day!

Lorrie wanted to do something for the admin assistant in her area at work, which meant I was baking something. Her job was to find a decoration for the top. She was hoping to find some of the Peeps chicks somewhere but what she came home with was even better. She found these marshmallow ice cream cone candies with pink, yellow, and white "ice cream" colors. I think they turned out pretty good.

The cupcake used the same yellow cake recipe I used for the Easter Bunny cupcakes. I've made this enough now that I'm comfortable with the recipe and what I need to do for them to turn out good. The frosting came from a can which I then colored yellow and pink. I had gotten marshmallow fluff too in case we had different candies but didn't use it. I think the white nonpareils just gave it a nice touch.

There were well-received and tasted really good. Lorrie has already mentioned she wants to do these again.

Easter Bunny Cupcakes

If you came to my site on Easter (or scrolled down a bit I guess), you were greeted by a picture of the finished army of these cupcakes. This was the first part of the Easter baskets Lorrie and I created. Originally, I hadn't planned on doing these. As Easter approached I assumed I'd be doing cut-outs again in rabbit and egg shapes. I changed my plans when I decided to try to do some things with less sugar but I still wanted a couple things in the basket that still were pure, unadulterated sugared-up treats.

I used a yellow cake recipe for the cupcake base. Lorrie and my uncle can't have chocolate so that's always in the back of my mind and something I plan for. I've used this recipe before for cupcakes and I know it tastes good. Going forward though I think I will look for something else. This recipe tastes good and is easy enough to make but still it is much more dense than I would prefer. I think I can do better.

I spent a lot of time trying to think of how to decorate these. I had the idea to do an Easter basket theme right away but it was trying to figure out the execution of it that took a while. My first thought was the Peeps chicks, but when I saw the packages and the actual size of each chick, I knew there wouldn't be room for anything else. It had to be the bunnies. I liked the malted milk robin eggs over any of the jelly bean options at the store and they stayed in the theme well as the decorated eggs in the basket. The grass was something I didn't expect to find or use. I used green-dyed coconut last year for the grass and wasn't going to give it a second thought this year until I found this new candy grass right next to the Peeps at Target. Made from potato starch and corn starch, the grass really didn't have much flavor but worked as an alternative to the coconut. Plus, I hate coconut so I was really going to try anything else. I think I spent the longest time brainstorming on how to stick all this on the cupcakes. I didn't want strong flavored frostings and some just don't hold well. In the end, I used marshmallow creme as the frosting. This worked really well. A little dab on the bottom of the Peeps bunny held it in place, for the most part. The marshmallow creme as frosting actually worked very well and was rather easy to put on and spread. Much easier than some of the frostings/glazes I've used in the past. Some did dribble down the sides and it did melt slightly in the sun but really, frosting makes a mess too.


Yellow Cake
from page 352 of the The King Arthur Flour Baker's Companion: The All-Purpose Baking Cookbook

Makes 12 cupcakes

12 Tbls. (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter
1 3/4 cups (12 1/4 oz) sugar
3/4 tsp. salt
2 1/2 tsp. baking powder
2 tsp. vanilla extract
4 large eggs plus 2 yolks
2 3/4 cups (11 1/2 oz) unbleached, all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups milk, buttermilk, or yogurt (I used buttermilk)

Preheat the oven to 350° F.

In a large bowl, cream together the sugar, butter, salt, baking powder, and vanilla until the batter is fluffy. This should take at least five minutes. Also, make sure your butter and eggs are at room temperature. This is a requirement for making a butter cake.

Add the eggs and yolks one at a time. Beat thoroughly before adding the next. Then slowly fold in a third of the flour, then half of the milk, then another third of the flour, the remaining milk, and then the last of the flour. Only stir until mixed. Overmixing will reduce the volume of air trapped in the butter and sugar.

Pour into your greased or paper-lined cake pans or cupcake pans. Cooking times vary by shape but the cupcakes took about twenty-five to thirty minutes and rotate the pan 180° about twelve minutes in. Cool in the pan for about five minutes for cupcakes and ten minutes for a cake and place on a wire rack to cool completely.

Easter Baskets

Lorrie likes to bring little baskets of gifts when we visit family and of course, I enjoy baking something for it. Easter is definitely one of those times. Last year's baskets were collections of sugar cookie cut-outs in Easter themed shapes. Rabbits with green-dyed coconut for grass, Easter bunnies with licorice whiskers and candy eyes, robin eggs, etc. (I took pictures but only one turned out.) But my dad is diabetic and a dozen sugar cookie makes me feel like a bit of an enabler.

So this year, I tried some different things in the baskets. A couple of 'Easter basket' cupcakes, a version of the Blackberry Oat muffins, and something new, a Cherry Spelt muffin. A couple of sweet things but a little more healthy and a lot less sugary. Other things in the basket to round it out were a small stuffed animal and a Peeps candy container filled with sugar-free jelly beans.

Happy Easter

from the Peeps bunny army!

Halloween Cupcakes

For Halloween this year, Lorrie and I had decided to do some kind of baking project. We thought about mailing cookies to some friends and what-not and that was the plan when I left to do the shopping. I was walking through Bev's World looking at the chocolate molds and inspiration struck. I grabbed a couple of the Halloween molds that would be perfect for decorations on the top of...cupcakes! Cupcakes are not things I tried before and I thought this would be a great time to try. I thought I could do some vanilla cupcakes and some chocolate. Instead of frosting, we would roll fondant and use a circle cutter and then put the little chocolates on top. So I picked up the necessary supplies and went home to convince Lorrie that this was the way to go. Eventually, she agreed.

First thing I had to do was make the little chocolate bits to put on top of the fondant. I picked up three molds: one mold that were half inch by one inch and said 'BOO' and two molds that had little half inch square cats, witches, ghosts, jack o' lanterns, bats, and skulls. This wasn't that hard. The candy meltsI was using melted easily in squeeze bottles after a couple quick zaps in the microwave. The squeeze bottles let you control how much and where you put the candy so I also reduced the need for scraping. I didn't need the backs to be completely smooth. In fact, I made a point on the backs so it would stick into the fondant and hold its place a little better. The standard color for skulls and ghosts was white, the color for jack o' lanterns and witches (I know weird but it balanced out the number of candies) was orange, and the color for cats and bats was black. To get the black candy I added black candy coloring to dark chocolate melts. For the mold with the word 'BOO' I pretty much stuck to orange and white candy melts. The candies set pretty quick in the fridge since the candies were small and thin. I did try 'painting' the molds a little more this time. With a toothpick and the black candy melts I added eyes to some of the jack o' lanterns and the ghosts and did hats on some of the witches. Still not near perfect, beautifully painted candies but I am slowly getting better at it.

For the cupcakes I chose two recipes from a cookbook I ordered a couple of weeks ago, The King Arthur Flour Baker's Companion: The All-Purpose Baking Cookbook. I like the other King Arthur book I have and it hasn't let me down so I believed these recipes would work. For the plain or vanilla cupcakes I chose the Classic Yellow Cake recipe on page 352. One batch of this recipe yields twenty-four cupcakes. I made two batches of this recipe so we could pick the best ones to use. The first batch didn't rise as much as the second batch but that isn't saying much. These cupcakes didn't rise much beyond the cups I put them in. They tasted good and to me that's the most important thing. The flatness and uniformity of these cupcakes lent themselves to using the fondant but then again maybe I'm just trying to find the positive of their appearance. In any case, they tasted good and looked fine decorated and I'd definitely use this recipe if I needed to do cake rounds for decorating. For the chocolate cupcakes I used the Devil's Food Cake recipe on page 351. This is my favorite of the two cupcake recipes I made. These rose much more in the cups and I probably overfilled them a little but I like the extra top. The flavor was good, a nice chocolate that hung around a little in the aftertaste. I also made two batches of these. Yes, two batches. For those of you not counting along at home, that's ninety-six waiting to be decorated.

Well, not exactly. Like I said we picked through and got rid of ones that didn't look right and so forth. Mainly it was excluding a lot of the first batch of the yellow cake ones but there were a couple of devil's food cake ones that were rejected. Having chosen the best ones, we set about decorating them. The idea was to have two colors, orange and purple, for the cupcakes. These seem to be predominate Halloween colors when we were looking at Halloween decorating ideas. I purchased white fondant and colored it myself. This sounds like it's going to be much more complicated than it really was. The toughest part? The actual mixing of the color into the fondant. The fondant I purchased was in two-and-a-half pound blocks. I worked about a quarter of a block at a time. It has the consistency of clay so working in the coloring was a lot of folding and stretching and recombining until the color was uniform. I alternated between doing orange and doing purple and I didn't really have any issues being consistent in the coloring. All the orange looked the same and all the purple looked the same. I would roll a little out, cut out the circles, and pass them to Lorrie. She secured them to the cupcakes by first brushing the cupcakes with a light coat of corn syrup. Once dry, the corn syrup held the fondant firmly in place. Rolling out the fondant is much like rolling out dough for cutout cookies, you need a well-floured surface and rolling pin but in this case, that flour is actually powered sugar.

Once all the cupcakes had the fondant layer, I gave them a dusting of pearl dust and then placed the candies. Pearl dustis used to give fondant a little shine or sparkle. Using the pearl dust took a little getting used to. A little goes a long way as I learned the hard way. My first couple cupcakes or so had a lot on them and they took a definite silver tinge to them. As with all of these new things I was trying I became better as I went. After all the cupcakes had a coating of pearl dust, Lorrie and I arranged the candies on top. It came out to be three different pieces per cupcake, usually one of each color though there was some variation. After laying out all of the candy on top, I put them in place with a light dab of corn syrup.

We had some baker's boxes to put them in and lined the bottoms with Halloween themed paper from the scrapbooking section of Michaels. The cupcake liners were Halloween themed until I blew past the seventy-two cupcake mark and then I used some plain ones that had a second aluminum cup (they are actually meant to be baked without a muffin pan, you just put these on a cookie sheet). Lorrie and I each took a box to work the Monday before Halloween.

End result? They looked good and tasted even better. The fondant tasted better the next day. I have to admit I thought it was a little chewing gumish when I first tried it plain but when I had a cupcake the next day it was good. The finished product reminded me a little of a Hostess cupcake in look and feel when I bit into one, but better tasting. I do think this would be a good way of doing a creme filled cupcake, sometime in the future.

Long Winter Cupcakes

Check out these incredibly delicious looking cupcakes! Called Long Winter Cupcakes, these renamed apple spice cupcakes use apple pie filling ((or stewed apples) and spices commonly found in pumpkin pie and topped off with a cinnamon cream cheese icing. I can't wait to try these! Also, I think the recipes given lend themselves to other fruits such as pumpkin (obviously) but also pears. One warning, the blog shimelle.com is based out of England so the recipes are written in grams and Celsius so there may be some conversion involved.

Found via Cupcakes take the cake