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

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!

Chocolate and Strawberries, Oh My!

Yes I know it's months later now, but I really started this whole endeavor of bring cupcakes to work on Valentine's Day.

Valentine's Day cupcakes were Chocolate Strawberry cupcakes with Strawberry Buttercream frosting. When my boyfriend (aka The Boy) tried them, he told me that they tasted professional, and that the strawberry frosting was really good and really unexpected. From then on I started dreaming of different combinations of cakes and frosting and my journey began.

Note: The way I judge if cupcakes/baked goods are good is how quickly they disappear from the common area at work. So far my fastest time has been 24 cupcakes in 1.5 hours.

Chocolate Strawberry Cupcakes with Strawberry Buttercream
Homemade bacon chocolates in the background
Personalized cupcakes in background