Lemon Cupcakes

Lemon Cupcakes with Lemon Curd Filling and Cream Cheese Frosting. 

What did you do today?

Lemon Curd Filling

Here's What You Need:

1 1/2 Lemons, Zested and Juiced

3/4 Cup Sugar

2 T Butter

4 Egg Yolks

Here's What You Do:

1. Make Cupcakes and Let them Cool

2. Put all of the ingredients in a small saucepan and cook on low low heat for about 10 minutes -- at least until everything is melty and lemony and incorporated. Stir almost constantly.

3. Take your pot off the heat and stir the curd (gently -- don't break your arm off) as it cools. 

4. Use a piping bag and pastry tip to pump your cupcakes full of lemon curd. Or just eat the lemon curd. Because it's delicious even though "curd" is on the list of worst words for awesome things ever.

Check it out

My friend OG sent me this lonely orange shout-out this morning. My first fan e-mail! I'm so flattered.

Fairy Cupcakes

This is definitely one of my favorite projects to date: Tinkerbell Cupcakes for a perfect fairy birthday party. I think birthdays should be special, especially when kids are little and things are still magical. Here's my little piece of magic.

I piped out the white chocolate outlines of these wings, then let them cool on a board covered with wax paper. Then I filled the fairy wings with gelatine and edible pearlescent glitter and let them dry for two days. They might not have needed that long to dry, but I wanted to be careful. 

I also made these little Tinkerbell wands, which took a ridiculous amount of time, but look how cute they are. 

Okay here's a whole bunch of pictures. I got kinda crazy with the camera.

Fairy Cupcake Preview

On Friday I'm making Tinkerbell Cupcakes for a little girl's birthday party. I'm so excited to get to do something so unabashedly girlie and cute and fun! I did a practice run on the cupcakes over the weekend. Here's a little preview of the ingredients that (I hope) will make the best Tinkerbell Cupcakes ever.

Crafting 3D Tinkerbell Wands

Hand Piped White Chocolate Fairy Wings Filled with Sparkling Gelatine

Delicious Vanilla Cake

Fairy Cupcakes should look like delicious flowers, right?

Finished Fairy Wants on Lollipop Sticks for Extra Magic

Chocolate Ganache

Not the most glamorous picture, but it will have to do. For my darling, chocolate-addict friend (who is also a huge fan of this! and this!) I made this little birthday dessert I like to call "Chocolate Never Dies."

Fudge cupcakes with dark chocolate chips (60% cacao) topped with dark chocolate ganache. Did you swoon? If not, re-read that last sentence.

Glad you're back.

Ganache can be used as a filling, a glaze, or a "frosting" and is just sinfully good in any of its forms. To get the ganache thick enough to pipe out of a piping bag onto cupcakes, I read about six recipes and came up with this. (Most recipes are pretty much the same, so if you already know how to make ganache, prepare to not be surprised by my recipe.)

Ganache

Here's What You Need:

1 T Butter
1 Scant Cup of Heavy Cream
1 Cup of Chocolate Chips, or roughly chopped chocolate. I used the Ghirardelli 60% cacao chips and it turned out amazingly dark and delicious.

Here's What You Do:

1. Chop your chocolate, or open your bag of chocolate chips. Measure it out into a medium bowl.
2. In a small saucepan bring the heavy cream and butter to a boil.
3. Pour the heavy cream over the chocolate.
4. Slowly mix the chocolate and the cream until they become one dark chocolately liquid.
5. Once all the cream is incorporated, you can put the ganache in the fridge if you want it to thicken a little faster (takes about 45 mins if your fridge is quite cold), or you can leave it on the counter. I like to give it a stir every 10-15 mins to make sure it's cooling evenly.
6. Enjoy.

*Note, for runnier ganache, add a little more heavy cream. This would be fantastic poured over the top of a bundt cake or as the coating or center of home made truffles.

Yellow Cake

My friend jokingly said she'd trade puppy-sitting over the weekend for cupcakes. I agreed before she'd even finished her sentence because 1) I love making cupcakes; and 2) Brownie needs a play date this weekend while Lito and I are in Napa.  She requested Yellow and Vanilla Cake with Vanilla Buttercream. Done and done.

Meanwhile on the other side of the universe, a friend asked me for a recipe for Yellow Cake. Sort of. So I'm stretching this into an opportunity to share an awesome recipe for Yellow Cake and to show off pictures of hot pink butter cream. Yum!

Yellow Cake 
Recipe Adapted from Smitten Kitchen (Her blog is 100% better/fancier/cooler than mine)

Here's What You Need:

4 cups cake flour (I use the kind in the pink box, because it comes in a pink box)
2 rounded teaspoons of baking powder
1.5 teaspoons of baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
2 sticks of butter
2 cups of sugar!! [sorry I left this out! how could I forget!]
1 tablespoon vanilla
4 eggs
2 cups buttermilk

Here's What You Do:


1. Set the oven at 350 & get your pans ready. (I pretty much always use the foil, paper-lined cupcake cups)
2. Sift all the dry ingredients in a bowl.
3. In your stand mixer, whip up the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Then add the vanilla. Then add the eggs. Then add the buttermilk. Do not freak out. The batter will look...curdled is the best word for it.

4. Add the flour mixture in small batches to the liquid mixture until everything is mixed together.
5. Scoop the batter into your cupcake pans (I use a spring-loaded ice cream scooper). Bake for 17 minutes.

 6. Nom.

Snowflake Carrot Cake

So lately I've had several requests for carrot cake, which I've never tried before because I don't really like it. I think it's a texture thing -- the cake is full of stringy carrots and nuts. I really dislike nuts in cookies, cakes, brownies, etc. We should talk about nuts some time. There are great uses for nuts. Chopped and thrown haphazardly into desserts is not one of them. But I digress. Carrot cake!

This carrot cake turned out amazingly moist and perfectly warm with more than a hint of cinnamon and clove. Here's a  peek at the final cake: Snowy and cool on the outside (January needs more appropriately wintery desserts) and warm deliciousness on the inside.

Did I mention that the kicker here, that actually forced me to go for a carrot cake recipe, was that it was our friend Crispy's birthday. Crisp absolutely adores winter/snow/christmas at all times and in all things and in all places. So we went for it!

Here's a shot of one of the six-inch rounds that I stacked  and later layered with the icy blue cream cheese frosting.

Since I had never even attempted a carrot cake, I searched the internet for "best" carrot cakes, and finally landed on Paula Deen's recipe for the best carrot cake cupcakes. The recipe was really easy to follow and (surprise to me) called for crushed pineapple, which I thought sounded absolutely delish. I made a few very slight modifications to the recipe, but overall, I think it's great.

[Below] Process: frosting an orange crumby cake with wintery cream cheese frosting. 

Elmo!

Little M and his mom (and their trusty yellow lab, Isa) take care of Brownie during the week while Lito and I are at work -- so naturally when little M turned two, I had to do something awesome for his birthday. Since he's usually dancing to Elmo or Thomas when I drop Brownie off in the mornings, and since I have this awesome piping tip and because Elmo is easier to make than Thomas, I made Elmo cakes. Voila!

Ingredients: 

• Body: Yellow Cake
• Fur: Red Buttercream Frosting (with a whole jar of Wilton "No Taste" red coloring)
• Eyes: Sliced Marshmallows and Sparkle Black Gel
• Nose: Peanut Butter M&M
• Mouth: Oreo

A couple of things I am happy about:

1. The fur! The red Elmo fur was actually red, didn't taste horrible (have you tasted red frosting? it's normally pretty gross b/c the coloring is too strong)

Cooking, but not posting about it here...

Until now! Christmas cupcakes.

Chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting!

Harry Potter Cupcakes

Okay, I admit it, I'm a total Harry Potter nerd. Yep. My ringtone? Hedwigs Theme.

Nerd.

So what, like I'm not going to make Harry Potter Pumpkin Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting and White Chocolate Toppers?

 And I was too excited to go see Harry Potter 7.2 to take any decent pictures of these before they were devoured. They were, by the way, delicious pumpkin cake with cream cheese frosting (adapted from Smitten Kitchen's lovely recipe). I added mini chocolate chips, which, if I say so myself, was a pretty

Happy Birthday to Me

Let's just see how big I can get the "cupcake" label in the cloud over here --->

A happy coincidence: A friend ordered a box of red velvet cupcakes the same week of my birthday. And happily, a batch of cupcakes is greater than a box of cupcakes. What to do with the extra cupcakes? Hmmmm. Happy Birthday to me! This time around I used Magnolia Bakery's recipe for the cakes, but played around with the frosting.

retro-post: cinco de mayo & margarita cupcakes

I grew up in a culture that generally doesn't imbibe much. At all. So I remember the first time when my family vacationed in Mexico, my mom ordered a virgin margarita to enjoy out by the pool (or the pond) and the bartender replied, So you want lemonade? Right?

And maybe he wasn't being snarky. He was probably just making sure he understood that we all wanted fancy drinks with little umbrellas without the complimentary (at that hotel) booze.

So for Cinco de Mayo, in honor of a culturally irreverent/irrelevant gathering at my apartment, I made "virgin" "margarita" cupcakes. Which is code for lemon cupcakes with cream cheese frosting and a twist of lime that made the frosting taste ridiculously good. Look at that lil twist! I'm smacking my lips right now.

Ahoy!

In honor of Halloween, of no longer being sick (after ten days in bed), and of Lito going back to work (despite the fact that he still has a very mean esophagus that hurts him), I give you: Pirate Cupcakes.

Oh Martha.

Peanut Butter Chocolate Cupcakes. Sounds good, right?

So yesterday my husband, Lito, was like, Heeyyy.... you haven't made cupcakes for a while...and the guys at work have heard a lot about how awesome they are.... The gauntlet was thrown. Cupcakes had to be made. So I sent a list of possible cupcake flavors I'd like to try, including PBChocolate, and that, my friends is what I made.

I returned to my perfect-bound Martha Stewart cookbook and flipped through to the loveliest picture of warm, perfect cupcakes. And I made the recipe. Here they are with frosting:

Bah.

So, here I am, expecting to be able to post on the magnificent maiden voyage of the kitchenaid mixer, and it was lovely, truly, so I should post on that, but instead, I'm going to tell you about some really lovely pretty cupcakes that didn't taste that great. That's right. They were okay. And maybe it should be preceded by the following caveat: I have no baking/culinary training whatsoever, other than what I've picked up along my quest to eat delicious desserts.

See? Aren't they pretty? The frosting tasted (tastes) fantastic BTW, but I knew it would -- butter cream frosting always tastes good.

So I tried Martha Stewart's buttermilk cupcake recipe. Yep, I'm calling out the queen of all things domestic and lovely. But here's the deal: other people have tried this recipe and liked it, so, ya know, maybe don't write her off entirely. Maybe just think before you make these particular cupcakes.
It looks like a Ferris Wheel of delicious cake.

So here's the scoop: the recipe, first of all, said that it yielded 36 cupcakes. When I made it, I came out with over 48, for a family of two, that is way too effing many cupcakes. Even for me.

Second of all, the cake wasn't dry. But it wasn't moist either. Someone explain to me how a cake that calls for EIGHT eggs (five whole and three additional yolks) can not taste like a dreamy dream loaf? Perhaps the eggs were the problem. The cake was dense but kind of stuck to the roof of my mouth. Irritating.

But absolutely lovely. No?

Chocolate Cupcakes

Last Thursday was my darling friend, President Susan's, birthday. I sent her a ridiculous one-liner email, "Do you like chocolate?" And this is what resulted. Happy day.



So instead of doing what normal people do, which is call before you randomly show up at someone's house, I just loaded up the cupcakes and drove over to where I thought her house was. Don't worry that I'd never been there before. Or that when I got there they had a security gate. Seriously, who wouldn't let you through a security gate if you had cupcakes? Note to all would-be criminals: begin baking.

Beach Vacation Cupcakes

Here's the latest in cupcakery around the house: The Beach Vacation Cupcake. Yeah, that Teddy Graham is wearing a pink frosting bikini. I know.

PS. Sorry my pictures are a little blurry...camera settings are off, I guess, because pics look fine in the viewfinder screen, but turn out like this after all the goods are eaten and no more pictures can be taken.

Here's another take of the finished product, complete with Teddy Graham in green board shorts.

And a couple of the process, because you want to see the gigantic mess I made.

For the record, I have approximately no idea where this idea came from.