From Victim to Addict?

NOW I've gone and done it!  I've crossed from recreational cupcakes to the hard stuff and I'm not sure I'll be able to control this.  I'm not sure I even want to!

The "hard stuff" is Snickers Cupcakes.  This recipe rates a full scale O M G.

Just looking at the picture makes me want a cupcake NOW!

The recipe can be found at My Baking Addiction  http://www.mybakingaddiction.com/snickers-cupcakes/     It's one of the recipes I'd marked to try out .  If I ever thought I could stop making cupcakes, this just put an end to that thought.   I should just start applying to be on The Biggest Loser now, because just one cupcake must be 4000 calories.  And I DON'T CARE!

I was a bit concerned about the measurements in the recipe since my trusty Duncan Hines Devil's Food Cake mix is now short 2 ounces AND I didn't have the large package of chocolate pudding mix.  I kept to the recipe except for using less cake mix and pudding and they came out unbelievably amazingly totally yummy GREAT! 

This recipe was originally posted in 2010  and is still getting comments on the My Baking Addiction blog and I noticed one from just a couple of days ago asking what to do if the only cake mix you can find already has pudding in it.  She responded to just use the smaller 3.9 oz box of pudding.  I'm anxious to try this recipe again with a) a large box of chocolate pudding and b) with the smaller box of pudding in the cake mix with the pudding already in it.  I'm curious what the difference might be.  Probably not much - I swoon too much when eating these to take note of anything but a huge difference!  LOL

If you like Snickers at all, you MUST make these cupcakes.  They're very easy.  Just watch out that you don't taste test the frosting too much (spoken as someone who did).  It is VERY sweet and it is VERY delicious and VERY addicting.  Also, I had exactly the amount needed to pipe the frosting on top.

You know ... the baker gets to eat the messy looking ones!

Tragedy Strikes My Cupcake World

O M G  -- What am I going to do???  The cupcake papers have come off the better texture/tasting lemon cupcakes!  This CAN'T happen with wedding cupcakes!

Wonderful lemon cupcakes - horrifying cupcake wrappers!

This is the absolutely FIRST TIME EVER that this has happened.   With decades of cupcake baking under my proverbial belt, how could this possibly have happened NOW?  The liners were the ones I used with the Easter cupcakes and there was no problem at all!  In fact, I remember thinking that the batter on this particular recipe acted similarly to the white wedding cake recipe I used for the Easter cupcakes and I thought it must have something to do with only using egg whites.

There were signs that this was happening, but since I'd never seen it before I didn't recognize it.  Not that there would have been anything I could do about it but ...

Now I've searched on the internet for the cause of this TRAGEDY and found no definitive answer! It's comforting  that I'm not the only one to have this problem -- but that doesn't help AT ALL.

The best remedy I found was in Sunday Belle  http://www.sundaybelle.com/making-the-cupcake-liner-stick-to-the-cupcake/     (Strangely enough, I found a kindred soul in this blog - mixing fashion and baking!)

Now I'm going  to make the cupcake recipe that caused the peeling a couple more times and see if her suggestions help.  If not, I've got to use a different batter or figure out some way around the peeling paper dilemma.

Oh, and as I'm wailing over this mysterious tragedy, hubby says the Easter cupcakes had started peeling when he took them to work, but he just thought it was because they were in a plastic container.

Obvious which wrappers are a problem - but why?

I'm Blue

I need to catch up here...

Well, THAT was a downer!  I searched the internet and my cupcake books for THE BEST blueberry muffin recipe I could find.  It kind of amazed me that all the recipes were so similar.

Anyway, finally I chose a recipe that had a ton of reviews where everyone and their proverbial brother LOOOVVVED them.  It is from the Taste of Home website and it is the Blueberrry Streusel Muffins

Isn't that a purty blueberry muffin?

Again, my wonderful convection oven proved itself to be simply amazing.  Those muffins were done so perfectly!  Frankly, I don't know why all ovens don't have convection as the standard.    Or maybe my old oven was worse than I realized!

But I'm still disappointed.  I was really looking for  h e a v e n l y  blueberry muffins.   They were very good, no doubt, but still just … meh.

I have some ideas to try the next time … and there WILL be a next time! 

In the meantime,  I'd love to know if anyone would like to share their  

 h e a v e n l y  blueberry muffin recipe!

Victim of the Oven

My oven died  a couple of weeks before Easter.

TWO WEEKS.  Two WHOLE weeks.  I had no idea just how much I use the oven until it didn't work.  

To make a long story short it was the day before my youngest son's fiancée's 21st birthday.  My son had called a few days earlier wanting to make sure I was making a cake or cupcakes for her because if not, he wanted to get her a cake.  It seems her mom had never made her a birthday cake.  It made me sad, but hey … we're not all into the same things.  Anyway, the pressure was on because not only had I told him she'd have cupcakes (I was going to be doing some for approval for their wedding) and you only turn 21 once!  It's not like I could make cupcakes on Friday and it would be "right" for her 21st birthday.  I learned that it's nearly impossible to get an oven repaired in this town.  Thus, the TWO WEEKS whine.  Hubby decided that maybe we should just get a new one since I'm going to be doing a lot of baking and I need a dependable oven.  What would have happened if this was the week before the wedding?

We went to the grocery on the Thursday before Easter.  We like to have a leg of lamb on Easter Sunday and had one all picked out.  Up and down the aisles we went and when we got to the baking aisle, I thought about making a special loaf of bread … and then it hit me … NO OVEN!  I can't even cook the lamb!

My hubby and I are the worst pair of procrastinators.  This was the jolt we needed, so the next day I met him at the appliance store after he got off work.  It's a little mom and pop local appliance store and we HAD done a little homework over the previous two weeks, so we knew their prices were actually MUCH better than Menards' and Lowe's and the selection was amazingly better, too. 

Faced with two rooms full of stoves, my heart went PittyPat!  Never been a fan of the stainless steel - fingerprints and streaks make me C R A Z Y!  Hubby said he wanted me to pick the stove I really wanted because I really do cook a lot.  I hadn't realized that a lot of the stoves with double ovens included a convection oven in the lower  oven and I've always wished for a convection oven.  But I finally narrowed the choice down to two, the main difference was the center burner and the color.  The black enamel stove had a small "warming" burner in the center and the stainless steel stove had a long burner in the center with a griddle.  The stainless steel stove won - I just don't think the warming burner would be something I'd use much while I know I'd use that long, full burner in the center. 

Decision made, begging for delivery on Saturday so I could make Easter dinner didn't work - there were already several deliveries booked.  Thankfully, we were able to borrow a pick up truck and the appliance store loaned us an appliance cart.  We got it home and hooked up and WOW.  :)  I love it!

Now I'm back to Fattening the World One Cupcake at a Time …  ok, maybe two or three cupcakes at a time?

My beautiful new gas range!

The Birthday Gator

Runway cake

Every year on each of my kids' birthdays, I've made their birthday cake.  I think it started because my oldest son liked airplanes since he was old enough to toddle through the house, screaming "AhBEE!  AhBEE!" when the F-4 jets from our local air guard base flew over our house.  (It took us awhile to figure out that he was actually saying "airplane")  We couldn't find a bakery who could decorate a cake with F-4 planes with cammo colors.  Taking into consideration my incredibly poor artistic abilities, I managed a cake with a chocolate runway with die cast metal planes stuck on cardboard and frosted over.  I found a picture of it in the depths of my hoard of his baby pictures. 

When this same son's birthday came around last fall, I wanted to continue practicing my decorating skills.  My dear husband , who constantly spoils me ROTTEN, surprised me with a couple of cupcake decorating books containing tons of cute cupcake ideas.  Some look almost overwhelming, but one day I'd really like to try doing some of the craziest ones.  Mostly, though, I've used them to give me some ideas.  Many of the designs are made with cupcakes grouped together and frosted as if they were one cake.  Because my kids all live over an hour away, there's no way I could transport an arrangement of cupcakes held together with frosting. 

Since my oldest enjoys asking friends and family to bring him back an alligator or a shark when vacationing, I knew which of the designs in the books I was going to do - the one where the cupcakes are arranged in the shape of an alligator.  I modified it slightly because I was short by a couple of cupcakes and because I had to be able to move them. 

Gator Eyes

Gator Claws

The book recommends using zip lock bags and cutting the corner out, but I really don't like using the zip bags -- over the years, I've never had much luck using them with tips with and without couplers, I used a #150 carnation tip, mixed up a swampy green color (mixed blue, red, and yellow paste color until it was sufficiently yukky looking) to create the overall "skin" and broke apart Hershey bars for the bumps.  While the book used marshmallows for the eyes, I couldn't justify opening an entire bag of marshmallows to use just one, so using a #12 round tip, I simply piped two round eyes and used a little blob of black frosting from that tube of black frosting.  Also, the book uses little hard candy bananas for the claws - I didn't have any, so again used a tube of yellow that I had with a leaf tip  and kind of starting out like a regular leaf then releasing the pressure on the tube and pulling away.  Not as pretty or perfect, as you can see, but it did the job. (I'm realizing now that keeping an assortment of those things that look like toothpaste tubes full of colored frosting, is probably practical for the times when all I need is a little bit of one color.)

Finished Gator

Know Your Flora and Fauna

Poinsettia decorated cupcake from my class.

It's umm… a little wobbly.  Did you notice

that the frosting is a little yellow?  The only

butter flavoring I could find was yellow.

NOW I know to look in the cake decorating

section at the store!

When I was taking my cupcake decorating class, one of the decorations we learned to make was a poinsettia.  It seemed to me that it would be pretty easy to adapt the poinsettia and make it become a sunflower.  My future daughter-in-law's  bouquet will be sunflowers and her wedding colors are black and PINK.

About that time, the plan for the wedding cake became wedding cupcakes.  One reason being that no one will have to stand and cut cake - it's just grab and growl.  (Betcha don't hear THAT said very often about wedding receptions!)

The plan, so far, is to have several different cupcake flavors, each decorated differently.  Plan A is:   1) White Wedding Cake with Buttercream Frosting (I'm thinking the sunflower will go on this one).  2)  Funfetti - believe it or not, I've never made Funfetti cake/cupcakes.  3)  Chocolate, and 4) Carrot cake.

To practice the White Wedding Cake, I made cupcakes with French Vanilla Duncan Hines cake mix and added almond flavoring.  I was shocked to learn that our local "most loved" cake shop uses cake mix and everyone thinks it's the best.  If it's good enough for them it's good enough for me, especially since I'm baking 200+ cupcakes all by my lonesome.  I'm not getting the right flavor, though, so I'm going to try just plain white cake mix - I'm betting the "French Vanilla" flavoring in the cake mix is overpowering the almond.  NOTE TO SELF:  Don't forget to make more white cupcakes to try out this theory.

But, I digress.  (I know, I do that a lot.) 

Anyway, I mixed up my batch of buttercream frosting and colored it the perfect sunflower yellow.  (I'm still amazed that I don't eat half of it before anything gets decorated.)  Pondering how to make black or brown frosting, I thought about chocolate frosting, but it just isn't right somehow, and it wasn't going to take very much anyway.  I happened to have several tubes of different colored frosting and one was black, so I thought I'd try that.  It was perfect!

Unfortunately, the flower wasn't.  After making several sunflowers using a leaf decorating tip (#352) to make the petals  and a small round decorating tip (#3) to make the center "seeds", my shapes were becoming more uniform but  the flower still didn't look right.  THEN the lightbulb came on (one of the GOOD lightbulbs like they have in cartoons, not one of those stupid curly cue things!) and I got online and actually looked at a sunflower.  DUH.  The center where the seeds are is huge on sunflowers!  (Remember … by any stretch of the imagination, I have ZERO artistic skills.  My stick people can sometimes be unrecognizable.)

After using the small round tip to put a gazillion little dots in the center of the sunflower exactly one time, that lightbulb flickered on again.  Use the multiple opening tip (#233).  Ta da!  Sunflower!  Showed them to the bride-to-be and the decoration was approved!

Victim of Cupcakes

Oh lawsy mercy! WHAT has happened to me? I'm addicted to cupcakes! (Making them, thank goodness - but I sure don't mind eating them, either!)

IT'S NOT MY FAULT! My children have done this to me.

You see, it started when my youngest son and his fiancee asked me to make their wedding cake so they could save money on their wedding.

He was 21 at the time and to date, my biggest accomplishment was making a Big Bird birthday cake that was actually recognizable as being Big Bird. I think that even might have been before his time - for his older brother. Maybe not. I don't remember.

There was also the T-Rex cake and then I also made Barney from the T-Rex pan, but other than those, their annual birthday cakes have been either layer cakes or sheet cakes with "Happy #st/rd Birthday, Insert Name" decorated with the theme of their year. Had a lot of hockey, airplane, baseball, and car cakes, and in my opinion, some were barely recognizable!

So I dug out all the cake making supplies I'd accumulated over the years and made some cupcakes for a dinner party we were going to. Surprisingly, they were well received! This was followed by a cupcake decorating class. Now, I was getting cocky. I think I can do this!

Equipped with supplies, enough knowledge to get me in trouble, and very little natural artistic skill I started the adventure.

I’ve started this blog as a place to record what went right and what went wrong, fun new things to try, and even a place to work on my photography skills.