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!