Team USA Inspired Cupcakes

This week I was at a complete loss at what to bake for work. I honestly wasn't sure if I was going to make anything (especially since half of my kitchen is packed up for our impending move). After talking with a coworker, she suggest I do simple plain cupcakes with plain icing and use red, white, and blue.

Now. Plain cupcakes with plain icing aren't quite my style, even if I marble the cupcake to make it red and blue swirls. So I took the red, white, and blue as inspiration and put my own twist on it.

I made red velvet (from scratch) cupcakes. I filled them with homemade marshmallow fluff (it's absolutely fantastic, probably the best thing I've ever tried) and topped them with blue and white buttercream frosting.

The cake was awesome, as was the filling. My buttercream icing was practically melting in my hands (my kitchen was a little warm), so it wasn't piping out as stiff as I liked (a couple cupcakes had the icing melt right off...so we ate those), but once they were refrigerated, it stiffened up and worked out well.

So Patriotic!

The missing section is where the melted icing ones were.
Then the boy and I ate them.

Note: I have this silly tendency to overfill my cupcake tins so my cupcakes end up a little taller/wider than I'd like...oops

First Foray into Cookies (the pretty decorated kind)

This week, I got an itch in my brain that was just begging to be scratched by baking and decorating sugar cookies. Decorating them properly. Different thicknesses of icing properly. And sparkles. Can't forget adding the sparkles to the cookies. The recipes I used were from Callye at Sweet Sugar Belle - she is fantastic; one of the best blogs I've ever read. It even prompted me to buy the type of food coloring that she uses (after my Wilton Red only turned the icing pink...and I used a lot).

I was going with a summer-esque theme and was aiming for colors that I could use in a couple weeks for the 4th. Unfortunately, my red only came out pink, so that was a bust, and I ran out of yellow flood icing (but not until I finished all my yellow cookies). And I so should have made those sun cookies into sunflowers, they would have looked much nicer that way. Oh well, you live you learn.

I love how sparkly the tulips came out

The entire platter that I brought into work

I even piped leaves onto the tulips!

Failed Key Lime Cupcakes with Whipped Mascarpone Frosting

I followed a terrible recipe for these cupcakes, there was absolutely no leavener in the ingredients...something I realized after everything had been baked and frosted.

I will redo these again, probably using a regular plain/vanilla recipe and substituting in lime juice for the vanilla extract.

The mascarpone frosting came out fantastic - such a great way to make a stabilized whipped cream frosting.

Peet's Coffee Inspired Cupcakes

For a while, Peet's Coffee (and they might still have it) had a Mayan Mocha Hot Chocolate - a hot chocolate with some cinnamon and some spice. And I thought that would be best turned into a cupcakes.

Enter the Chocolate Cayenne cupcakes with Cinnamon Chocolate buttercream frosting. They were sweet and they were spicy. And the texture of the frosting was to die for (not to mention my piping job came out awesome). They were gone pretty quickly when I brought them into work. (I was hoping that they would elicit a thank you note the way the last spicy cupcakes that I brought in did, but alas no love).

I would totally make (and eat) them again. I love this frosting, it's probably one of the best buttercreams I've ever made!

Pecan Braids

I was at Panera recently (ok, honestly it was a month and a half ago) and had a free dessert courtesy of my birthday month. I strolled up and down the dessert case for a solid 3 minutes before I found something that didn't look super dry (or super greasy) and wasn't a cookie (which looked dry or greasy). I settled on the pecan braid, even though I'm not a huge fan of nuts in my food. However, when I ate it, I was hooked. The only thing I could think about was baking (and eating) more pecan braids. After a lot of research on the best puff pastry dough recipe (I didn't want it to end up like the chocolate croissant debacle), a pecan filling, and a way to braid the dough; I was on my way to yummy baked goods.

 Unfortunately the only picture I remembered to take is a terrible one, but there they are - the ones that didn't burn at least. They were gone pretty quickly, and I consider them a success. I still have more puff pastry dough in the freezer to play with for next time.

Happy Cinco de Mayo

For Cinco de Mayo I made margarita cupcakes with salted lime frosting. Rather than using milk in my recipe, I switched it out for Mr & Mrs T margarita mix (I also threw a splash of tequila in there for the proper margarita taste). The frosting was buttercream which I made with lime juice and ground some Himalayan sea salt on top. My test batch was better (in my opinion) but regardless the cupcakes were delicious and were gone within an hour.

Final batch of cupcakes brought into work!

Friday night test batch

Test batch!

Decadent...fruity...cupcakes

Blueberry cupcakes with white chocolate frosting drizzled with chocolate ganache. I replaced some of the milk in my recipe with the juice from pureed blueberries - which totally made the cupcakes a grey color. The frosting was warm when I piped it onto the cupcakes so it melted all over the cupcakes, but it worked really well.

They were all eaten within an hour and a half when I brought them into work - so I'd call that a massive success!

Pretty cupcakes (despite the fact that they were grey)