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.