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.  

Duelling Lemon Cupcakes

My son always requests lemon cake with lemon frosting for his birthday cake, so of course, one of the wedding cupcake flavors will be lemon on lemon.

Now, I know I could take the easy way out and just use cake mix and pre-made frosting but where's the fun in that?   More than that, I want newlyweds to have "special" cupcakes.  I'm satisfied with the white wedding cake cupcakes.  I'm satisfied with the carrot cupcakes, but need to work on a good cream cheese frosting for it.  I'm ok with the "funfetti" cupcakes using the wedding colors.   But I haven't even started checking out chocolate cupcakes yet.  Yikes!

So I've been wandering around online and in my cupcake books and even my regular cookbooks, looking for THE lemon cupcake recipe and I've narrowed it down to 3.  Once I decide  on which two I want to make both and try them side by side to see which is better.   Actually, I have been working on these cupcakes off and on all week.  I thought it would be easier if I made the frostings first and bake them  another day and finally made them last night.

The first is a lemon cupcake I found online  ………  so far, it's winning the race.  The frosting is ... O M G … it's amazing!  I think you could put this stuff on liver and onions (sorry, liver lovers of the world) and it would be delicious.   It's from MyBakingAddiction  http://www.mybakingaddiction.com/lemon-cupcakes/

So, I made the frosting from the second recipe - also found online.  It's just a tiny bowl full!  I'm a bit disappointed .  Maybe it's because the recipe instructions used mini cupcake pans - maybe you don't  need so much frosting.

First Recipe -   Looks pretty good

The oven preheated and I got the first recipe finished.  It's pretty easy and straight forward.  This is a huge plus because I know that no matter how well I plan and prepare, the 2 days before the wedding will have me suicidal.  Since these are just test run cupcakes, I put them in the white papers that were between the foil papers.  I even got 30 cupcakes from the recipe.  (I'm not even sure if you're supposed to use the foil in direct contact, but I have in the past and no one has died so far.)  They baked nicely and I'm pleased with the look.  Unfortunately, the texture and taste was just .. meh.

By the time I got to the second recipe - the one from MyBakingAddiction - the kitchen was 80+ degrees and the butter sticks were REALLY soft.  I'd taken the two bowls of different frostings out of the fridge so they wouldn't be so hardened that it would be difficult to pipe.

Second Recipe - Not quite a pretty

This recipe reminds me a lot of the white wedding cake batter but not as thick.  The recipe uses 4 egg whites, so that makes sense.  It also uses cake flour, which I don't mind because I do have plenty of it.  It also calls for lemon zest, so I ended up with 2 lemons worth of juice that I didn't use - I put each lemon's juice in a separate keeper cup.  That way the next time a recipe calls for "the juice of one lemon" - I've got that (so there!)

These cupcakes came out beautifully, as well.  I was only able to squeeze out  23 cupcakes so it made a few of the papers not as full as the should have been.  That's ok - I'm EXPERIMENTING!

The kitchen was so hot by this time that my brain may have melted.  I removed these cupcakes from the pans right away.  Honestly, I don't know why.  I usually let them cool about 5 minutes in the pans so I can touch them with my hands when taking them out.

Both recipes together

I'm saying this because …..  Wait for it … tomorrow I'll tell you.  Leave a comment if you think you've guessed.