Hot chocolate cupcakes with peppermint buttercream frosting

I have had an exciting and memorable yet busy December! Earlier in the month was Evan's 29th birthday. I made him Street Fighter cupcakes (they didn't exactly turn out how I imagined, so I didn't post them here). Then, my dad's side of the family came in for an early Christmas get together. My parents had more than 20 people at their house! It was so great seeing everyone. I spent s lot of time finishing up Christmas shopping and a bunch of DIY projects I was making for my family, Evan's family, and my friends. THEN, on Dec. 22, my wonderful Evan took me to the park to look at Christmas lights and he PROPOSED!! Needless to say, I've been a bit preoccupied and didn't get to post any of the Christmas-themed cupcakes I made this month.

For my day's family Christmas celebration I made hoot chocolate cupcakes (basically, they're chocolate with mini marshmallows baked in them) and then I made my buttercream frosting, but instead of adding vanilla, I added peppermint extract. SO YUMMY! Anyone who knows me, knows how much I love sprinkles, so this year I bought a bunch of different kinds so I could make s few different cupcakes. Personally, I think the ones with peppermint crunch looked especially adorable, but my absolute favorites were my snowflake cupcakes! I used some silver sugar sprinkles to look glistening snow and then sprinkled the snowflakes on top! They all turned out nicely. I made a lot of compliments on them.

I then made a dozen of just chocolate (no marshmallows) with peppermint buttercream for a good friend of mine who celebrated a birthday last week. I have been one very busy girl! Can't wait to start brainstorming new cupcakes for 2013!!

Thanksgiving turkey cupcakes

I have been attempting to post about these cupcakes for the last few weeks! I have been SO busy that I've had to put posting on the back burner. I had two Thanksgiving dinners this year: one with my family and one with my boyfriend's family. My parents went to their condo for the holiday to work on some remodeling projects, so our family Thanksgiving was the Saturday before the holiday. My uncle came in from Tennessee for dinner and there were a few other family members who were able to attend.

Anyway, on to the cupcakes. Last year my cousins and I attempted to make some turkey cupcakes that turned out awful. They didn't look anything like what they were supposed to. This year, I decided I needed something creative, but not impossible like the ones from last year. I found this idea on Pinterest! I LOVE Pinterest. So many cute ideas!

I used Wilton's candy eyeballs; Nutter butter cookies and Oreo cookies; Candy Corn; and I made some frosting dyed it yellow and orange, and made the turkey noses and necks (which, BTW, I learned the other day from my doctor is called a wattle).

The cupcakes themselves are two different recipes. The first recipe (with the smaller Nutter Butters) are vanilla cupcakes with chocolate buttercream frosting. The second recipe is one of my FAVORITE recipes! They're vanilla pumpkin cupcakes with cinnamon buttercream frosting. The first time I made the turkeys, I used the tiny Nutter Butter cookies, but I like the bigger ones better, so when I made them the second time, I got those instead.

These cupcakes were a hit with everyone who tried them. I think I've got a new Thanksgiving cupcake to make from now on. :o)

Halloween spiders

I spent the weekend in South Carolina with my aunt, uncle, 14-year-old cousin, and 12-year-old cousin. Let me just say, if I haven't already in this blog, that my cousins are a lot younger than I am, but they're taller than I am! This makes me SO jealous. I wish I was tall.

Anyway, my cousins are cheerleaders for their middle school and had a cheerleading competition this weekend, so we wanted to make cupcakes for their squad. Since it's almost Halloween, we chose to make spiders! My aunt and I went to a bunch of different stores to make sure we got everything we would need for the cupcakes. I couldn't bring my entire kitchen with me on the 7-hour drive to visit them, so we had to buy a lot of stuff.

After we FINALLY found everything, we got to work! I started by making frosting and custard filling prior to the girls getting home from school, so that they could help with the decorating of the cupcakes. I made vanilla buttercream frosting and I dyed half of the batch a grayish-black color for the bodies of the spiders with Wilton Icing Color in black. I then made a pumpkin spice custard for the filling with Jell-o Instant Pumpkin Spice pudding  and light whipped cream. If you like pumpkin spice pudding, go to your nearest grocery store and buy as much as possible because it's only available during the Halloween/Thanksgiving season and it is DELICIOUS.

The girls and I made two-dozen French vanilla cupcakes and two-dozen chocolate cupcakes. We cored the cupcakes after they cooled and I showed Leah how to pipe the filling inside the cupcakes. Then we started frosting them. Leah and Carsyn put the eyes and legs on the two-dozen spiders, and then we frosted the other two-dozen with white buttercream and topped them with orange and black sugar sprinkles.

On Saturday, after my aunt and I ran in the Color Me Rad 5k, we had to scrub all of the color off of us and then she, my uncle, and I hopped in the car and made the 1.5-hour drive to the cheerleading competition to watch the girls. After they competed, the parents of the cheerleaders had this whole meal thing set up for them in the parking lot. I don't think these girls know how lucky they are! When I cheered, we never had something so nice. We ate concession stand food or waited till after the whole thing was over to go out to eat. I hope these girls appreciate how amazing all of their parents are to do such a nice thing for them.

Oh, and their team won first place in their division! They did GREAT! I'm proud of my cousins, as well as their entire team. :o)

BOO! It's almost Halloween!

I wanted to try out a new recipe for Halloween/Fall and I thought I'd make the cupcakes in a Halloween theme! The ghosts are made with marshmallow fondant and I used Wilton Edible Color Markers to draw the faces on them. The others I am calling "witchy gnomes" because I wanted to make witch hats, but I got another idea after I was making the hats. They're made from sugar cones, melted chocolate, and edible eyes.

These cupcakes are vanilla pumpkin cupcakes with pumpkin spice and cinnamon buttercream frosting. They're an interesting recipe that calls for sour cream! They're delicious though. :o)

Summertime cupcakes

I've been extremely busy this summer, so I thought I'd make an entry with a few of the cupcakes I've made over the last few months. From the first photo to the last they're hydrangea cupcakes for a cookout, chocolate cupcakes with raspberry buttercream, vanilla cupcakes with vanilla buttercream for a high school's 10-year class reunion, and two sets of mini cupcakes with drop flowers made for a surprise brunch birthday party.

I have a new mixer. It's pink and it's amazing. I absolutely love it! All summer I have had to use a 30-year-old hand mixer since my old stand mixer broke and I wanted to research and find the perfect mixer before I bought a new one. I found a Sunbeam and it came in a color called PINK FROSTING, so I couldn't resist. How could I be a baker and pass up the opportunity to have a mixer with a color name like that? It was on backorder for two months, but it finally arrived a few days ago and I used it to make a new batch of cupcakes (which I will post when I have time to upload new photos).

I hope everyone has had a great summer!

Caramel cupcakes with chocolate walnut frosting

I've had a few people say they want me to make some chocolate cupcakes in the last month or so. I don't normally make chocolate cupcakes because I don't really like chocolate, so unless it is going to someone else, I stay away from it because it will just be wasted at my house. But, I wanted to try my hand at making caramel cupcakes and when I sought advice from a few other bakers, everyone thought some type of chocolate frosting would work best with caramel. I added the walnut for decoration because I didn't think sprinkles or roses or anything like that would work with these cupcakes. What do you all think?

Mother's Day cupcakes

In honor of Mother's Day, I made some flower cupcakes for my mother! These are french vanilla cupcakes with buttercream icing. I love how the mixture of the blue and purple turned out.

Wedding/bridal shower cupcakes

One of my closest friends recently hired me for her best friend's bridal shower. My only requirements were that the cake had to be a three-tiered white cake and it had to have white roses. I didn't have any requirements for the cupcakes.

Anyway, my friend from Germany is visiting me, so I enlisted her as my assistant. The bridal shower was on Saturday and we were leaving Friday, so we started working on everything on Tuesday. We made seven batches of buttercream icing and four pounds of marshmallow fondant. That was the easy part. The next day we spent hours mixing, baking, leveling and icing the cakes and baking the cupcakes. Thursday was decoration day. It was the day I was most nervous about. After I was done with work that day, Franzi and I got right to work on decorating. We rolled the marshmallow fondant out and smoothed it over each cake tier, then got to work mixing colors to get a purple the shade of the swatch my friend gave me to match with.

I'm only posting the cupcake photos on the blog as I didn't take a great photo of the cake. What do you think?

Cup-pies

I know, I know. You're thinking, "Kyla, these are NOT cupcakes, they're PIES!" But, I MADE them in a cupcake pan, so they're tiny like cupcakes, which means I am posting them here. I was super excited to try these out. I've never made a pie in my entire life, so it was a fun thing to attempt. I think they turned out awesome. I made cherry, strawberry, blueberry, and peach. I wanted to also make apple, but I ran out of pie crust. Oh well. I will have to make some more this weekend!

Lady bug Spring cupcakes

I randomly made these the other day after wanting to try out a new cream cheese icing recipe I found. At first I was just going to make some basic red velvet with cream cheese icing, but then I got the idea to make a spring-themed cupcake. Cream cheese icing doesn't work as well as butter cream to make decorations, so instead of making grass with my decorating tip, I chose to use Wilton's green color spray to make the icing look like grass. The lady bug is a cinnamon chewy candy I drew on with Wilton edible decorating pens and some black icing for the head. The flower candies are spring sprinkles I have been dying to use for awhile.

Pink lemonade treats

 

As I have probably mentioned before, I've been learning how to make cake batter and icing from scratch. My icings are delicious (if I do say so myself) but I am still experimenting to find the perfect cake batter recipes. I have had a vacation planned to go to South Carolina for the last few months and I wanted to make cupcakes with my cousins (who are 11 and 13). Since I wasn't familiar with their kitchen (or what they had or didn't have that I would need) and knew that I couldn't take every single thing from my kitchen on a car ride for seven hours, I decided to settle on a box mix just this once so that my cousins and I could focus on having fun and not worrying about missing ingredients.

While grocery shopping for a box mix, I came across a pink lemonade flavor. I texted with my cousins and made sure they liked the idea of a pink lemonade cupcake, then bought the box mix. Then, since I worried my cream cheese and butter cream icing recipes wouldn't go with a pink lemonade cupcake, I bought the pink lemonade icing too. That evening, I searched my kitchen for some things to make these cupcakes perfect. I got straws, cake liners, icing bags, tips, etc. and packed them in my suitcase. I intended to buy lemons when I got into my aunt's town, but I guess the excitement of finally arriving in my destination made me forget to buy them.

The icing on the cake (pun intended) is that when I arrived to my aunt's house, they happened to have a bunch of leftover lemons from another family member's recent stay there, so I was excited. Leah, Carsyn, and I put on our aprons (which I made the three of us a few months ago) and we got to work.

I got to teach the girls how much batter to put into the cupcake liners and how to even them out. Then I showed them how to fill and hold the icing bags and pipe icing onto the cupcakes. We cut the straws and lemons and decorated the cupcakes and had a great time. Needless to say, they were a hit. The two dozen cupcakes we made were gone within 48 hours!

I've already found a pink lemonade mix to make from scratch online and I am going to find an icing recipe too. I have so many great summer ideas planned for this cupcake flavor!

I decided to attach two extra photos with this entry. One is of Carsyn, myself, and Leah (and yes, I am aware that even though I am more than a decade older than both of them, they look my age) and the other is of Carsyn pretending to drink the cupcake like it is a real pink lemonade.

St. Patrick's Day cupcakes

I have been trying to find ideas for St. Patrick's Day cupcakes for a few weeks now. When I saw rainbow sour strips at the grocery store I knew I had the perfect idea! The only problem with my idea is that you cannot find gold chocolate coins anywhere these days! I have looked at grocery stores, pharmacies, etc. and couldn't find any! However, I was glad I could at least find gold chocolate nugget candies, so I had something to go at the end of my rainbow. I have some ideas to tweak these cupcakes in the future, but I think they're pretty cute now. :o)

Present birthday cake

My mom's birthday is coming up and I wanted to make her a cake that looked like a present and this is what I came up with! The woman who taught all of my cake classes helped me decide on how to make the wiggly strips on the bottom layer. I had never made them before. I surprised my mom with the cake last night and I'm pretty sure she loved it. :o)