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.

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!

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.

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.