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?

Cake Decorating Lesson 4

My last class masterpiece!

We had our last class this week - learned roses and writing.  Boy are roses HARD!!! 

Anyways back to the beginning of the week.....
The Cake
We had to bring an iced cake to class this week.  So my plan was to make a chocolate cake with a mint filling/icing.  I found a great chocolate cake recipe online!  The cake was delicious....yum yum yum....even 4 days later it was good!  The cool thing about it is that it had 1 cup of freshly brewed coffee as one of the ingredients!  Great part about that is it didn't taste one bit like coffee.  I would know too because I'm very sensitive to the flavor of coffee....not a fan :)

Chocolate Cake Recipe

The Filling
So as I said I wanted to do a mint filling.  I decided to get creative and not look up a recipe.  I had some heavy cream in the fridge so I poured the whole thing (almost full one of those small cartons) in my mixer and set it on a medium speed.  I let that run for a while....I would say maybe 10 mins.  It started getting stiffer, like whipped cream.  That's when I started adding in my confectioner's sugar - I started with about 4 cups or so but I ended up putting in a total of about 6 cups.  Then I took about 6 or 7 Thin Mint cookies and crushed them up really fine in a ziploc bag and threw those into the mix.  Put in a little bit of green food coloring and BAM the yummiest filling EVER in my book :)  I got rave reviews on the filling!

The Icing
So, to go along with the mint theme I decided to also throw some mint extract into the icing I was making for the outside. I really don't love the taste of the 'crisco' frosting....aka grocery store cake frosting.....so I wanted to make a buttercream instead.  It certainly looked pretty in the bowl...and tasted delicious!  The only problem is that it doesn't do well in warm temps apparently.  When I started to ice my cake it got very runny and then during class it 'melted' alot.  You can see it in this picture of my final cake - those flowers along the outside were originally on the side of the cake and then slid down.  Still looks kind of cool though - almost like I meant to do this....um ya I meant to do this :)

Class time
So we learned writing and roses during our last class this week.  I loved learning the writing and my teacher said I did a great job.  I think my first attempt at writing came out pretty darn good?  Roses on the other hand....holy crap thats hard.  Plus it was really warm in the room so my icing was mushy....that made for tippy flowers.  I'm going to need to perfect my roses before I post pictures of any of them - they were sad looking haha! 

Have a great weekend and Happy Mother's Day to all the mom's reading this!!!