Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Coconut

This is the coconut cupcake. It's a coconut flavored cupcake with a vanilla cream cheese frosting rolled in sweetened coconut. This one is really tasty. I didn't want to do a coconut frosting because i thought it would be to much, and all that coconut flavor would be over powering. I think the way i did it was perfect and everyone really liked it!

Peanut Butter Fudge

 This is the peanut butter fudge cupcake. My husband loves loves loves peanut butter, he would eat it on everything if he could. It's a chocolate cupcake with a fudge core topped with a whipped peanut butter frosting, and drizzled with fudge. This were really good and went perfect with a big glass of milk.

Caramel Dream

This is the chocolate caramel cupcake. It's a chocolate cupcake with a caramel core, vanilla cream cheese frosting with a caramel drizzle. These were really good. When you bit into them the caramel would ooze out it tasted so so good.

Cupcake Saturday 8/28

So cupcake day happened a day early this weekend and i have to say "Cupcake Saturday" doesn't have as nice a ring as "Cupcake Sunday!" The reason for this change in my cupcake routine is Monday i started my last semester of school, and Sunday i needed to make sure i have everything ready. Although Saturday i planned on making a coconut cupcake, peanut butter fudge, and a strawberry cupcake, a terrible headache deterred me from that accomplishment. I did manage to make the coconut, and the peanut butter fudge and i must say they came out awesome. I also decided i would make a chocolate caramel cupcake with some of the chocolate cupcakes from the peanut butter fudge. They were really good as well. So this weekend is going to be all about cupcakes both Saturday and Sunday!

Monday, August 23, 2010

The Most Loved Flavor: Red Velvet

So when researching online i found that the most popular flavors sold at cupcakery around the world is red velvet. Now i have never really had this flavor before, but my sister loves it soo much and has been begging me to make it. So with an amazing cream cheese frosting under my belt i decided to tackle it.  Looking at about 50 different red velvet recipes it seemed very weird to me to use vinegar, but whatever that's how it is. So i started my red velvet journey. I decided on red gel food coloring instead of the grocery store kind. I would need to use almost 2 full bottles to get the color i wanted and that seemed like to much. I didn't want the batter to be too watery. I also learned a valuable lesson when using cocoa powder, always sift it. There can be tiny lumps in the powder that you won't see until your adding your dry ingredients into the mixer. So anyway i continued along the red velvet road, and ended up at the baking soda, vinegar crossroad. I hate the smell of vinegar and working with it grosses me out (lets just say dying eggs at Easter not easy when you are using one hand to dunk and one to hold your nose, LOL). So i decided that i would go with a sweeter version of vinegar, apple cider vinegar. I figured the sweetness would make the cupcake taste good and the caramel color would help the red of the cupcake really stand out. Well, lets just say it worked and they came out so good. But i had to get the approval of my sister, after eating four cupcakes, i took it as a sign that she loved them!

S'Mores delight


So when deciding what kind of cupcakes i wanted to make a s'mores cupcake was a definite. All summer long i beg my husband to light the bonfire in the pool area so we can make s'mores. So i had to come up with a really good recipe so we could have s'mores all year long! I decided that the cupcake itself was going to be the chocolate. Now i just had to come up with how to incorporate the graham cracker and the marshmallow. I decided i would make a graham cracker crust on the bottom and sprinkle graham cracker on the top before baking. I then made a marshmallow icing made from scratch using gelatin,sugar, and water. It came out AMAZING! To top it all off i had my husband use a torch (he would never let me near an open flame, LOL) to toast the tops. When my husband tried it, his exact words were "this is my favorite cupcake EVER!" See, isn't he the best husband ever!!So now i have an awesome s'mores cupcake recipe, I'm so excited that we will be able to eat s'mores during the next huge snowstorm!!

Cupcake Sunday 8/22

So my husband has made it a rule that i am only allowed to bake cupcakes on Sundays. This rule, he says is because he doesn't want me baking cupcakes everyday (which i would). I know this rule is so he isn't eating cupcakes everyday (which he would). So i created cupcake Sundays, where i baked and frost as many different kinds of cupcakes i can, until my husband wakes up that is. He works midnights so he doesn't get home till around 7:30am, so he usually sleeps till 3pm. I have the whole day to myself to just bake, bake, bake! Well yesterday was fun, i was up at 8am, i was to excited to sleep. Yes, that's right i was excited over baking cupcakes! I still needed a couple of things from the store so i took my butter, milk, and eggs out of the fridge that way they would be room temperature by the time i got back. By 8:15 i was back from Wal-mart, and ready to start the baking! I made four different kinds of cupcakes Red Velvet, S'mores, Lava Fudge(everyone loves it so much i had to make it twice!), and Vanilla.

Pictured above is my beautiful stand mixer my husband got me for our anniversary last year!