Easter Cupcakes

So I made some cute Easter cupcakes and thought I'd share.  I just made my basic vanilla cupcakes and vanilla frosting and then spent lots of time decorating.  Its not always easy to take so much time on the decorating - the decorating alone took me an hour! 

Great way to use Peeps!  And they were a hit at Easter brunch :)

Christmas Cupcakes

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!!

Hope everyone had a nice holiday season.  Here are some cupcakes I made for the holidays.  I used my coconut cupcake recipe for the polar bears and the snowmen.  The smaller ones that have holly on them are chocolate cupcakes (the recipe that has a cup of coffee in them!).

The real fun was in the decorating!  To make the polar bears I used a large marshmallow for the head.  I dipped it in frosting (my homemade buttercream icing) and then rolled them in coconut.  The paws are made from white spice drops.  I colored some frosting black (just a mix of red, blue and green) and piped on paw marks and the faces - eyes, nose and mouth.  The snout and ears are just blobs of frosting covered in more coconut.  They were a hit!  Don't forget to sprinkle coconut on the actual cupcake which ends up being the body of the polar bear:

Next were the snowmen - at first I tried making a tall snowman:

He ended up being too tall and way too much time to make.  I ended up with more of a 'melting' snowman.  I put a large marshmallow in the microwave for 10 secs or so.  You want to make sure it blows up a little bit and then when you take it out of the microwave it starts to settle back into shape - but much more soft.  I frosted the cupcake with my white buttercream and then pushed the microwaved marshmallow into the frosting.  I made some green icing and piped that around the neck for a scarf (I used a leaf tip).  The buttons, eyes and mouth are using the same black icing I colored for the polar bear.  The nose is a small piece of an orange spice drop, the arms are pretzel sticks and the hat is a oreo cookie!  It ended up looking like a french snowman with the oreo hat - but still very cute.  So cute in fact that no one wanted to eat them!!

The other ones you see in the picture above are using a red spice drop and just green leaves making it look like holly.  Then I used two mini candy canes for the others and just piped on a frosting bow. 

Wishing you all a safe and happy holiday season!  More to come in 2012!

Bruins Cupcakes

OK....I'm back!

I took the summer off since it was just too darn hot to put the oven on and I just didn't feel inspired!  Time to bake again!  I made these cupcakes for the first Bruins game this season and since they're playing tonight I'm hoping to give them some inspiration to pull out another win

These cupcakes were delicious!  AND the best part is they were only 140 calories and 4 grams of fat EACH!  I used a low cal recipe and to be honest, was afraid that they might taste like it too....but boy were they good.  I didn't tell anyone they were low fat and no one noticed - that's when you know you made a good/healthy treat!  Here's the recipe:
http://chocolatecoveredkatie.com/2011/09/20/cream-filled-chocolate-cupcakes/

So that was my most recent creation.  There was one occasion this summer that inspired me to make some delicious treats!  We did a potluck at work this summer and I attempted to try cupcakes in an ice cream cone.  I stuck with the staple of vanilla and they were good - but got extra points for presentation!  And I put chocolate chips at the bottom of cone so it ended up being a little surprise at the end.

Ok so I promise to bake more!  Will see you soon :)

The Almond Joy Cupcake

I know, its been too long!  We've had a few busy weeks and a round of dud cupcakes.  I attempted the coconut cupcake a few weeks ago and it was just not good.  It was dry and it tasted nothing like coconut SO I didn't think it was worth talking about :)

This week was a different story - I made the most delicious coconut cupcakes ever!  Topped with chocolate frosting and a milk chocolate covered almond.....I've named it the Almond Joy cupcake.

Here's my recipe for the cupcakes - there's a lot of different coconut substitutions but its worth it - you get the best coconut flavor:

Ingredients

• 1 cup white sugar
• 6 tbl spns butter
• ½ cup coconut cream
• 2 eggs
• 2 teaspoons coconut extract
• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 3/4 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 cup coconut milk
• ½ cup coconut flakes

Directions

1.     Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease and flour a 9x9 inch pan or line a muffin pan with paper liners.

2.     In a medium bowl, cream together the sugar, butter and coconut cream. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, then stir in the coconut extract. Combine flour and baking powder, add to the creamed mixture and mix well. Finally stir in the coconut milk until batter is smooth. Hand mix in the coconut flakes, don't over mix. Pour or spoon batter into the prepared pan.

3.     For cupcakes, bake 20 to 25 minutes. Cake is done when it springs back to the touch.

To top them off I wanted to create a chocolate frosting.  I made my usual buttercream and then made a chocolate ganache and mixed it in to the frosting.  Very good flavor but it was too melty for me.  I need a frosting that can be out of the fridge without looking droopy!  I'll need to perfect this my next go around - more confectioner's sugar is usually the answer for a droopy frosting so I'll try that first.  Any suggestion's on making a good chocolate frosting that is easy to decorate with would be great!

I also wanted to mention a class I took recently with a friend of mine.  It was called specialty cake decorating.  Basically it was how to make and use fondant, how to ice a cake and then how to build a tiered cake and decorate it.  It was really fun. I wish I had known we needed to have a design ready when we took the class - I didn't like how mine came out but it was really fun and I learned a lot.  Fondant is never something I ever want to make....there's way too much work involved!!  I did enjoy creating with it though...its just like play dough!  It doesn't taste very good though....

Here's my creation:

Thanks for reading!  I'll be making some cupcakes for a work party this week so stay tuned....

Memorial Day Cupcakes

Happy Memorial Day!  Well, Happy Belated Memorial Day!

I was busy over Memoriald Day weekend making some fun cupcakes for our Memorial Day BBQ.  I started out by making my french vanilla cupcake receipe, except this time I added 1/2 cup of applesauce to try and get a more moist cake.  It was definitely much better this time but still needs more vanilla and maybe a tad more moistness still. 

So my goal was to make hamburger cupcakes!  I started out by cutting my vanilla cupcakes in half.  I mixed up some green frosting and put it into my icing bag with the leaf tip and off I went decorating the bottom half of the vanilla cupcake with what I was hoping would look like lettuce.  Next was the burger...I had frozen some of my chocolate cupcakes from the last batch, so out of the freezer those came to defrost and then I cut those in half too. I then took a half of a chocolate cupcake and put it on top of the 'lettuce'.  Next I mixed up some red frosting and drizzled that over the top to look like ketchup - here I am at this point:

Next came yellow icing for mustard and then put the top half of the vanilla cupcake back on and sprinkled some sesame seeds on the top so it looked like a bun!  What do you think?

With the rest of the vanilla cupcakes I decided to go patriotic.  I took the rest of the red frosting from the "ketchup" I made and put that into my icing bag and then put some white icing in on top of that.  That gave it the 'tie dyed' look you see below:

The blue I did after the red ran out of the bag - just added blue frosting to the white that was already in my bag and then started icing.  You'll notice that some of them have a darker color than others - that just means it was closer to the end of the white at the time.

All in all it was a really fun project!  Next up I think I might try a friend of mine's recipe for coconut cupcakes!  MMM but what kind of frosting? Any suggestions?

Awesome Chocolate Cupcakes

This post is going to be shorter than normal - its Memorial Day weekend and I have some fun cupcake ideas brewing that I'll want to write about later.  So I made the most delicious chocolate cupcakes this week! 

Its the same recipe I used for my chocolate cake from my decorating class.  Turns out that recipe makes great cupcakes!  I decorated them with a vanilla buttercream icing - this time when I made the icing I only used butter, confectioners sugar, milk and vanilla...no crisco.  It was really good.  I think I could make it either way which is nice since the thought of crisco still creeps me out.

I decorated some of them with a crushed thin mints and those were a hit.  This will definitely be a recipe for the books - number 1 of the receipes I've made....for now....

Perfecting the Vanilla Cupcake

Hello readers!
So my job now is to perfect some of my receipes.  Chocolate and vanilla are the basics and I want to get those right so here I go.  This week I made the french vanilla cupcake receipe again and created my own buttercream frosting.    The french vanilla recipe was in a previous post if you'd like to see.  This time I added a little bit extra of cream and milk but still it wasn't moist enough for me.  I did get much better reviews this time.  I think next time I make it I'll try some applesauce to moist it up more!

The buttercream I made though came out awesome.  I couldn't find a recipe I loved so I made one up and darn it I think I just about nailed it.  Its the perfect mix of sweet and whipped but not too much of each.  Plus it was a good consistency to bag and pipe on the cupcakes. 
Here it is:
1 cup of shortening
1 stick of softened butter
3 cups of confectioner's sugar
1 tablespoon of vanilla

I think the only think I'd do differently next time is increase the amount of flavoring I put in.

Oh and I put sprinkles in the cake too so it looked like funfetti!  I need to come up with another name for funfetti - any thoughts?