Autumn Wedding Cupcakes

Wow … Christmas sure got in the way of my cupcake making!  And writing.  And a lot of other things, too.

The cupcakes for wedding #2 came out really well.  The candies were a hit, too.

We finally settled upon Carrot Cake cupcakes, Snickers cupcakes, and white wedding cake cupcakes.  Although we were using previously tried flavors, the decoration needed personalizing.  The wedding colors were the colors of fall leaves, with orange being the dominant. 

I made the white cupcakes with the same recipe as I used for the sunflower cupcakes earlier.  Our bride-to-be really hadn't requested anything particular as decoration and I really wanted them to be pretty and special for her.  Up until now, I really hadn't done much with flowers.  All I could come up with was a deep yellow rose, leaves … it was just very abstract in my mind.  Not having made roses since my class a year earlier, I wasn't entirely sure I could do it, but … I did!

Unfortunately, I didn't have the brains to take photos of the process.  It really was kind of a struggle, though.  The edges of my rose petals were incredibly jagged.  I know a little bit makes it look more "natural" but this was AWFUL.  It was hot in the kitchen so I thought the frosting consistency was wrong.  I tried making it really soft.  Didn't work.  Tried really tight.  Didn't work.  FINALLY thought to go get a new rose tip.  Mine was a tiny bit bent.  Amazingly, that was the problem! 

 So … I made a bunch of yellow roses.

And then … I put them onto the newly frosted cupcakes and added tan leaves, burgundy flowers and green vining leaves.  Um .. I may have gone a little crazy.  But they sure were pretty!

I was disappointed in my Snickers cupcakes.  They tasted perfect, but I topped them with chocolate trees trimmed with fall colored leaf sprinkles.    I couldn't think of any way to frost the cupcakes with seriously gooey caramel, so I simply pushed the tree into the top of the cupcake and sprinkled a few leaves on top.  Also … I didn't take the height into consideration.  When we started putting them in my smaller cupcake stands, they were too tall and we ended up having to almost place them flat on top.  Thank goodness the cupcake was universally loved!

Here are the steps for the trees:

The Sunflower Wedding Cake

Our bride and groom wanted to have a somewhat traditional small top tier wedding cake to freeze for their first anniversary.  I struggled with the decoration - it couldn't be all fluffy and roses and pearls … all traditional wedding cake-y.  It just wouldn't have fit with the feel of the cupcakes.

I knew I needed to have sunflowers as the floral part of the cake, but at the time I was starting to plan the cake decoration I still wasn't happy with the sunflower decorations on the cupcakes.  It's great to live close enough to go to Country Kitchen (or maybe it's not!) because just browsing all the wonderful cake and candy supplies helps me come up with ideas. 

One of the reasons I wasn't happy with the cupcake sunflowers was that the centers just didn't look right.  I didn't want to use Oreos  because they were really too big and they just aren't, well … pretty.  Wandering down one aisle at CK, I found different sizes of sunflower/daisy fondant cutters and daisy center stamps.  I thought I had the answer to my problem and also I thought  the multiple sizes of the  sunflower cutters  would be helpful in decorating the cake.  Since I already had the black fondant for the lizards, all I needed was plain fondant that I could color for the sunflowers.

Work in Progress

Once I got home with my new acquisitions, I started hunting around the internet for instructions for making gumpaste sunflowers.  You Tube has several really good videos.  After a bit of trial and error I learned that using the proper equipment really does make a difference.  I tried rolling the fondant with my trusty marble rolling pin and I just couldn't get it thin enough.  When I finally broke down and got a fondant rolling pin and mat, it was a breeze.  I also had to get the veining tools.  It makes a huge difference!

Large Fondant Sunflower

Small Gumpaste Sunflower

It turned out that the daisy center stamps weren't large enough for the biggest size of the sunflower.  I ended up using a round cutter on black fondant to get the right size.  Then the light bulb came on.  I had some teeny round black sprinkles so I made a sugar glue and painted one side of the round then pressed it into a bowl of the sprinkles.  Ta da!  I was finally happy with my sunflower center!  On the cupcakes, I didn't want to use fondant so I just piped some black frosting the right size of the center then dipped the black into the sprinkles then added the yellow petals. 

I made a bunch of each size sunflower.  I used two large sunflowers "glued" together to make the large flowers for the top of the cake and put one of each size of the smaller sunflowers together for the smaller flowers.  The daisy center stamps worked fine for these.

And then … I realized the sunflowers needed leaves.  By that time, I had no more time to run to Ft. Wayne to get  any kind of leaf cutter or embosser and poking around in my box of cookie cutters didn't produce a leaf cutter.  So I just cut them out and used the veining tools.  Somehow, they came out looking ok.  Not great, but ok.

The cake was the last thing I decorated and I finished it at 4:00 the morning of the wedding.  I was having so much fun that I really never got tired.  My hands were getting sore and you can see the piped decorations on the cake - the bows and swags aren't very good.  Fortunately, the cake was so high on the stand that no one could really inspect it!  LOL

We loaded all the cupcakes into the cardboard boxes with the inserts that night as I completed them.  I left the cake until "morning" (2 1/2 hours later!) to make sure the icing had hardened a bit. 

Cleaned Hatbox

Moving the cake was horrifying but I got it on the bottom of my trusty Tupperware cake taker but when I tried to put the top on I discovered the big sunflowers on top caused the cake to be too tall.  Ho-ly c r a p.  My husband thought of a hatbox.  I'm a mild mannered owner of an online vintage clothing shop, so hatboxes I have but I needed a big one.  I thought of one particular box because it is plastic and came apart AND it was already damaged so I only use it for storage.  After washing it up thoroughly, it served its new purpose perfectly.

Cake in Hatbox

As I was cleaning up my mess a few hours earlier, I put together a little "kit" with white and pink frostings, pastry bag, the decorating tips I had used, and a few extra little sunflowers and leaves.  This was fortunate because I had to re-do the shells on the base of the cake because they all broke off while moving it.  One pink bow got a bit squished so I re-did that, too.

Honestly, I still can't believe how smoothly it all went.  Guess that 6 months of practicing and planning really paid off!

Ta Da! My Wedding Cupcakes

I'm still having a hard time believing I actually was able to make 130 wonderful cupcakes that my son and his (now) wife would be pleased with.  I'm also starting to go through withdrawal - it feels strange to not have a specific goal to bake for.  While I was searching for recipes and hints and help, I came across a LOT of yummy sounding cupcake recipes and I'm anxious to try them out now so that helps.

Before going any further with patting myself on the back, I can say with certainty that I would never have been able to pull off the wedding cupcakes without  this  blog post on Baa Baa Cupcake, Have You Any Frosting: 

http://baabaacupcake.blogspot.com/2010/09/how-to-bake-wedding-cupcakes-at-home.html

So … without further ado, here are my cupcakes

Sunflower Cupcakes - White Wedding Cake

 I'll post a full photo of the cake in my next post.

Lizard Cupcakes - Confetti Cake

Dinosaur Cupcakes - Lemon

Carrot Cupcakes

And finally -- The cupcakes set up at the wedding

Cupcakes for Wedded Bliss

It's over!  My baby boy is married to a wonderful girl and they are off on their honeymoon.  And I didn't embarrass them OR myself - the cupcakes were apparently a hit.  :)

There have been many times in past "projects" that I have maybe "bitten off more than I can chew" and afterward swear I will never do that again.  This is NOT one of those times.  

Despite getting only 6 hours sleep in the 48 hours prior to the wedding and having my feet and legs swell from standing for so long -- it was a TON of work, but I would SO do it again! 

The last couple of weeks were just too busy with wedding preparations, experiments, events, and baking (plus my oldest son had a surprise closing on his first house the Friday before the wedding, so we added some celebrating and moving to  all the other things necessary for the week of the wedding!)  I never really had a chance to write anything or edit any photos, so I'm getting a little caught up here.

• Lizard Confetti Cupcakes:  I found a lizard candy mold and pressed black pre-made fondant into it, then used a  fine decorating tip (#3, I think) to decorate them.  They turned out really cute!

• White Chocolate Frosting:  I made another batch of the chocolate cupcakes with the white chocolate icing and increased the amount of white chocolate.  What I found is that I still have to increase the amount of powdered sugar and it really didn't accomplish much.  I also discovered that this frosting does not travel well - particularly if it's hot outside.  And because it never really sets up, it's next to impossible to remove the cupcakes from the cardboard holders without squishing the frosting and sometimes the cupcake, too.

• FINALLY got the sunflower cupcake decorating perfected!  I'm really pleased!
• The little black and white sugar decorations I used on the white chocolate cupcakes a) weren't as large as the ones I printed and used when I was experimenting and b) because they were small, the white on white color disappeared into the frosting.

• A vintage hatbox - the clear plastic kind with a "quilted" lid and base - will work to transport a cake that is larger/taller than a typical Tupperware type cake taker.

• Purchasing cardboard boxes and cupcake inserts is the ONLY way to move 130 cupcakes from one location to another.

• Once cream cheese and buttercream frostings are WELL set up, they travel pretty well and are reasonably easy to remove from said boxes.  Squishy frosting that never really sets solidly (aka white chocolate) is a big problem.

• I learned how to use gum paste to make awesome sunflowers to decorate the 8" cake - all by myself <patting self on back> and they were delightful!

• Purchasing an 8" styrofoam dummy cake to practice is an EXCELLENT idea.  I was able to play around with colors, sizes, and ideas to see what worked without taking a chance on the real cake.  (I'll post a photo of the real cake soon!)

 

I'm still cleaning the kitchen.  There was a lovely, very fine layer of powdered sugar in my baking corner and I swear I used just about every piece of baking equipment in my kitchen.  Most of that is already clean, so today's main project is reorganizing and putting things away AND washing the cupcake stands.  The kitchen looks rather barren without all the cupcake equipment that has lived there, fairly permanently, for the last 3 months!

I'll post some photos of the finished cupcakes soon.

Is It Possible To Have Too Much Chocolate?

Well, IS it?!   It's hard for me to know - I'm defective.  I like chocolate but I don't LLLOOOOOVVVEEE  chocolate.  Hubby is a chocoholic, but me … I'm into fruity flavors, like the lemon cupcakes.

I'm working on the last batch of trial cupcakes for the wedding.  I left chocolate for last because .. hum .. let me see … I'm not sure, but it was probably because I didn't think I would be doing anything other than using a box of cake mix.  Not much trial and error involved there.

I don't want to get too far away from the cake mix because I really am concerned about time issues.  The lemon cupcakes are, by far, the most complicated and time consuming - and it shows.  They are seriously exceptional and well above  the others I've made.    BUT now, I feel like just using the chocolate cake mix would be such a blah cupcake that I started searching for something to ramp it up a bit. 

With my trusty Duncan Hines Devil's Food cake mix in hand, I started to do some recipe searching.  About that time I started wondering what the difference is between devil's food and chocolate cake.  What I found isn't really definitive, but it seems that devil's food may be a richer, more dense cake than plain chocolate cake because it uses butter and melted chocolate (when made from scratch). 

Some years ago, someone started putting applesauce in cakes, to replace some of the fat.  Then someone got the idea to put pudding in the cake mix to make a really moist cake.  Originally, we had to add our own pudding, but at least one of the cake mix companies now has some cupcake mixes that already have the pudding.  Oddly, I have never tried adding pudding to any cake mix (or applesauce, for that matter).  Today, I tried it.

In my recipe search, I came across a website - and I am truly sorry that I can't remember which one because I looked at so many and made a lot of notes and then I couldn't find my way back to it - that said to add a small package of instant chocolate pudding, 1 cup of sour cream, 1/2 cup water, and 1/2 cup oil with 4 eggs to the chocolate cake mix.  It is RARE that I have sour cream in the fridge.  It's another one of my quirks - WHY do I want to eat SOUR cream?  I don't drink SOUR milk?  But I did have an 8 oz tub of sour cream because I confused the ingredients of 3 different lemon frosting recipes and ended up with this stupid sour cream that I didn't know what to do with!  I shall call it 'Providence' because if I didn't have that in the fridge I would never have tried this "recipe".

Since I'm still fearing the cupcake paper fiasco, I used 1 of each kind that I will be using on the wedding cupcakes, PLUS one of the kind that peeled so terribly.  Then I finished up with using the liner I intend to use with the chocolate cupcakes.  After they had been out of the oven for an hour none were peeling.  But I'm sad.  They were all lovely with their puffy domed tops and now they're just plain FLAT.  The frosting will hide that, but still ….

 Again, soothe my need to make "special" cupcakes I decided I needed chocolate frosting on the chocolate cupcakes.  But the color of chocolate won't work with the decorations.  So I'm going with white chocolate frosting.  I hope.  I made the recipe but it is almost runny.  VERY high fat with the cocoa butter, butter, and cream.  The recipe called for 3 1/2 Cups of powdered sugar but it was still soupy, but by the time I added another cup of the sugar the chocolate flavor started to disappear.  I managed to pipe frosting on all 24 of the cupcakes and am sent them to work with hubby.

As it turns out, the devil's food / chocolate cake was fantastic!  It certainly deserves a special frosting, but since the chocolate flavor went missing I still don't know if the white chocolate frosting will be too much.  The frosting got RAVE reviews - even higher ratings than the lemon!  Sometime later this week, I'm going to have to make the cupcakes again and try to adjust the icing recipe and add more white chocolate.  Or maybe just leave well enough alone. 

As a last comment:  NONE of the cupcake liners peeled. Not even the one that peeled on every cupcake.  I made sure the batter was spread out to the sides of the liners.  There was no buttermilk in the recipe and whole eggs (vs egg whites) were used. 

Searching for THE Cream Cheese Frosting

Sunday was the final trial of the carrot cake cupcakes.  I had decided to use Duncan Hines' Carrot Cake mix because I just have a feeling that, no matter how well prepared - no matter how much planning, on the day of cupcake baking, I'm going to need help.

The decision to use the cake mix for the carrot cake cupcakes was made when I made my strange carrot cake.  I was really happy with the cake, so I've been really comfortable with just doing this last "trial run" so that I could test a homemade cream cheese frosting.  BUT … I've just discovered that the mix makes only 18 cupcakes.  I will have to make 2 separate batches.  I'm not really concerned about that but glad I found out now, though.

I wasn't entirely happy with the colors of the cupcake liners used with each decorating "project".  The sunflowers, for example, just don't look all that great on the pink swirl.  The carrot cake white frosting with the orange carrot doesn't really look all that great to me in the pink liner either.  With that in mind - and also the cupcake liner peeling problem - I made all but 4 of the carrot cupcakes in the pink liners because that it is what I had the most of.  I made 1 cupcake in each of the other 4 liners.  I thought that would also give me the opportunity to see how the other papers react - are they self-peelers with the carrot cake mix?

I made the "Cream Cheese Frosting II" from the Allrecipes website.  Most of the recipes I found were very similar.  This one was chosen because of the review that said that this recipe is for those who want real cream cheese flavor, not really sweet, not like the stuff you buy at the grocery.  That's what I want.  Except …

I read the recipe wrong.  It called for 2 CUPS of sifted powdered sugar.  I read 2 POUNDS.  Oops. 

But I'm really glad I goofed.  The frosting was GREAT and when hubby took them to work (my unofficial guinea pigs) he said everyone loved the frosting and the cupcakes disappeared quickly - maybe even quicker than the lemon cupcakes everyone loved.

That said, I can't imagine what the frosting would have tasted like with only 2 cups of powdered sugar!  The "real cream cheese flavor" and "not really sweet" needs to be taken literally!    Using the 2 lbs of powdered sugar, no one felt it was overly sweet and there is still the *tang* of the cream cheese.  I'm sticking to the 2 lbs in my recipe.

As for the cupcake liners, I used the lightweight pink liners for all but 4 of the cupcakes.  They're just a little bit shiny - reminds me of  the old "onion skin" paper used with typewriters or waxed paper - but there's no wax.  I had absolutely NO peeling.  The black liner is the same as the pink, but 3 were the heavier, decorated liners because I still haven't completely decided which flavor/decorating will go in each.  I removed all the cupcakes by picking them out of the pans, cooled them completely, and frosted them all identically.  Still no liners peeled.  This is just weird.  Now I wish I had made one of the cupcakes in the liner that seems to always peel.  Didn't think of it.  Rats.  I'll be making more of the carrot cupcakes than I need when W-day comes, so I'll try to remember to make one in the liners that have been so much trouble.

 I think that the carrot cake looks good in the pink swirl liner.  The plain pink wrapper almost clashed with the color of the cake.  

So now I think the different kinds of cupcakes, frostings, and liners are all set!

Countdown to W Day Begins

Holy cupcake, Batfriends!  That little alarm just went off in my head.  The first wedding is less than a month away now! 

Yesterday, I decided I'd better try my own version of Funfetti.  We're going to use pink and black sprinkles and I put them in Duncan Hines French Vanilla Cake mix.  And I added 1 tsp of clear vanilla just to see what happens.

So far, 24 cupcakes have been pretty reliable from the cake mixes I've used.  I intended to make 24 and try to squeek out a 25th so I could frost 5 in each design in each different cupcake wrapper to see how it comes out.   You know that saying about the best laid plans…

The BTB (Bride To Be) chose the 5 different cupcake papers.  2 are single colors (fuchsia and black) and the other 3 are patterned.  When I loaded the papers into the cupcake pans, I noticed that the single color ones seemed lighter weight but didn't think much of it. 

Pink &Black Liners are the tiniest bit shorter

When the cupcake batter was scooped into the cups, I only had 22 and managed to get a 23rd by scraping and scraping the bowl and taking a little bit from each of the other cupcakes.  What the heck?  I set them side by side and found that the plain black and plain pink ones are slightly shorter.  Unconsciously, I must have put more batter in the larger cups.  ALSO -- so far these papers haven't peeled!

I'm feeling a little more secure after decorating the cupcakes - I know I can do it now.  BTB approved all decorations and the amount of the jimmies used to make the custom funfetti cake.

I learned:

1. I'm blind.  I couldn't find the black and white wedding decoration sugar thingies at Country Kitchen, so printed the picture of them, cut them out and stuck the paper on so BTB could see what it would look like.  Almost.  We stopped by Country Kitchen and asked … the black & white sugar thingies were there all along.  I just couldn't see them!
2. If I'm piping on the frosting, don't put a crumb coat on - it looks weird.
3. The fancy carrot decorations look a LOT better than the little ones, even if in a cluster.  (Although, I wonder  how they'd look if I added fuzzy tops by hand.)
4. I am still not happy with my sunflowers. 

5. Am I the only one who thinks the black jimmies on the pink frosting look like mouse (pardon me) turds?

6. Speaking of looking like turds…. I need a LOT more practice using the large round tip to frost.

7. I still don't know why these cupcake papers haven't peeled.  The pink and white swirl ones and the zebra stripe ones are made by the same company that makes the ones I had so much trouble with (lemon cupcakes).  The only difference I can find is that there is a cupcake logo on the bottom of the troublesome liners.  Maybe those are different than the others?

 

8. For safety's sake, I need to bake most of the cupcakes in white Betty Crocker papers and then put them into the decorative ones.
9. The pink frosted cupcakes were supposed to have black lizards with pink features.  A squiggled blob of black frosting doth not a lizard make.  I could be in trouble here.  

Lemony Dinosaurs

The results are in!

My husband took the cupcakes to work with him.  It's a small office, consisting of 3 women and 5 men, so I figure there should be enough diverse tastes.

First, the cake.  Rave reviews!  Yay!!!  Everyone loves the taste and the texture, which is leaning toward being almost like angel food cake, but not that thick and dense.

Second, they liked the decoration and one of the girls especially liked the spiky green grass.

I talked with the June fiancée last week and we've sort of decided on the remaining decorations for the cupcakes.  And, we added a flavor - lemon. 

This son always asks for lemon cake for his birthday and this year, of course, I made cupcakes - with the usual boxed version of lemon cake, but I made buttercream frosting and flavored it with lemon flavoring.  My hubby gets awful blisters in his mouth from citrus acid and I've learned to either use flavoring or make sure it's cooked and/or with a lot of milk product to cut the acid down. 

This son is such a kid at heart.  :)  I hope he never changes.  This is the one who loved Barney, and dinosaurs - the Stegosaurus, especially.  While the other one likes weird things like alligators and sharks in the bathtub (JOKE!!) this one likes goofy things.  Like stegosaurus bathtub stickers.  You get the idea.

I'm lucky enough to live reasonably close to Country Kitchen Sweetart that a couple weeks ago, hubby took me there to scout for what kinds of things are available and to pick up some cupcake wrappers.  We also picked up a catalog that we gave to the June fiancée.  She had looked through it and showed me what she liked as decorations.  At first, she was concerned that some weren't "wedding" enough but I told her that it's HER wedding.  If she wants blue brontosauruses  swinging from trees THAT is what she should have!  (Thankfully, she doesn't because there ain't NO WAY I could pull that one off!)

Lemon cupcake with dinosaur sprinkles

So, between the two of them it has been decided that there will be lemon cupcakes with lemon frosting and hard sugar dinosaurs as decoration.  I was kind of hoping they'd decide on the decoration I did on son's birthday cupcakes - colored sanding sugar and little dinosaur sprinkles because I really thought it was cute and pretty.  But they like the dinos, so dinos it will be!

Lemon cupcake with star sprinkles

Next, I have to find a really good lemon cake and frosting.   For the fun of baking, I prefer to try not to use cake mixes but time's running out so I might not have a choice. 

For today, though, I have some blueberries that never made it into my yogurt so I'm hunting either blueberry cake recipes or blueberry muffins.  I have a blueberry muffin recipe and I hate it.  I have a blueberry bread recipe and it's really good, but I want to try something different.

Easter Egg "Nests"

Jelly Bean Easter Egg "Nests"

Before I started dinner on Easter Sunday, I wanted to make those cupcakes I'd been wishing so desperately to make for two weeks.  

The goal this time was to use a white cake mix to determine if it would be an acceptable "wedding cake".  When I took the cake decorating class, I was shocked to learn that they actually use the same old cake mix from the grocery with the addition of a little bit of almond flavoring.

I used Duncan Hines Classic White cake mix and added 1 Tbls of almond flavoring.  Apparently, I've never used that particular mix because I've always make white cake with the entire egg, not just the whites.  I never know what to do with the yolks left over.  The directions didn't give me the option of using the whole egg so I used just the whites.  I'll figure out what to do about those yolks, eventually!  Note to self:  make a list of things to do with just egg whites and just egg yolks.

The consistency of the batter as I scooped it into the cupcake wrappers reminded me of marshmallow cream.  It makes sense because marshmallows are mostly egg whites and sugar.

Another thing I noticed is the difference between the cupcake wrappers I'd gotten at Country Kitchen and the ones I'd been getting at the grocery.  The "specialty" papers  are quite a lot heavier! 

The virgin run of the convection oven!  I have 4  cupcake pans -- 1 will accommodate 12 cupcakes and is a lightweight aluminum.  The other 3 hold 6 cupcakes each and are heavier aluminum and 2 of them have gotten quite dark over time.

White Wedding Cake Cupcakes from the Oven

I loaded the pans into the lower oven - the convection oven - on two shelves, one each side of the oven.  The pan holding the 12 cupcakes started to get a bit golden on the top so I checked them and they appeared to be done but the two pans of 6 cupcakes weren't.  I took out the first 12 and started letting them cool and kept a close eye on the remaining cupcakes, which took about 5 minutes longer.  I'm not sure why, but I suspect it may have something to do with the heavier weight pans and that they were darker.  The main thing is, all three pans had really nice looking cupcakes with NO burnt bottoms!

While the cupcakes finished cooling, I mixed up my buttercream frosting and colored it with leaf green paste color.  Then, using a #233 decorating tip - it has lots of tiny holes - I covered the cupcakes with "grass".  I learned this in the class I took and they were a bit more nest-like.  I found it difficult to do in class and couldn't quite recreate it this time, either.  I like the look of grass, so that's what I went with.  Then added three jelly beans for color and voila!  Easter eggs "hidden" in the grass!  

This is really quick and easy.  I'm going to try to think of more ways to use this tip.  One thing I did learn is that, my frosting was a bit dry at first.  It took a lot of effort to squeeze it through those tiny holes.  After I thinned it with a tiny bit of milk, it was much easier and went a lot faster.

As for the cupcakes, they were wonderful!  Very moist and soft - almost like angel food but not so dense.  The addition of a tablespoon of almond flavoring seems to give it the "wedding cake" flavor, too!

Christmas Cupcake Tree

Seems weird to be writing about Christmas, but I'm trying to keep everything in order.  It's kinda fun to see my progress, now, looking back.

As soon as my son's birthday is past, Thanksgiving blows into my kitchen.  Sadly, we couldn't all get together but son had received a frozen turkey LAST year from his company and was fearing the Christmas ham that was coming, due to lack of freezer space.  Frozen turkey lasted a year because said son didn't know what to do with it, so I had him thaw the bird in his fridge and bring it over for feasting on Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend with the requirement that I would show him how to cook it and all the other "required" Thanksgiving treats. 

No matter how many years I make Thanksgiving dinner, for some reason it's still slightly intimidating.  It's truly easy - we don't do anything "fancy", just stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potato casserole, veggie, and pie.  Unless it's a BIG family get together, in which case there is a veritable blessed MOUNTAIN of food.  But, it was just my husband and one son and me, so we only had enough excess to make us all happy with the leftovers.

What's that got to do with cupcakes?  Not a damn thing.  That's the point … I never got to make the cupcakes with the turkey decoration that we did in my class.   Oh well, next year.

Christmas Cupcakes

But, just a couple of weeks later I went to a luncheon where everyone brought something and I volunteered (or maybe someone else volunteered me) cupcakes!  What better way to see if my skills were getting better?

They came out so pretty!  I hated to take them  anywhere and let them be eaten.  I just wanted to LOOK at them!  They were a hit at the luncheon and right before we devoured them, I realized I hadn't taken any pictures of them!  They were simply repeats of the ones I learned in my decorating class but this time they weren't as wobbly.  All together, displayed on an acrylic stand, they were the perfect decoration and I really wanted to remember them.  Here's a photo from my phone, the colors are off but at least I have something to remember them by.

Here's what I mean by seeing progress:  the first photo is a cupcake I decorated in class, the second one is the "practiced" one.

Before

After

Before

After

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