Z as in Zebra

In September, I started a cupcake adventure. If you haven’t read about it yet, you can do so here.

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Now that 1/4 of 2010 is behind us, it’s a good time to remind you of the fun and excitement that came with ringing in a new year! What better way than with a batch of confetti cupcakes?!

First…you get to take out some aggression on a bag of Jolly Ranchers.

Aren’t they pretty? All those little candy bits look like pirates’ treasure! Jewels!

Then…guess WHAT!…you cream together butter and sugar to start the base for your batter.

Eggs and other such ingredients round things out.

Then the pretty candy pieces are thrown into the mix.

Sorta looks like a bowl of Fruity Pebbles that sat in milk too long, huh?

The yellow (and red) papers complemented the confetti batter quite nicely.

Next, sugar and egg whites are combined to form the icing.

Once that mixture is a bit frothy…

You use another pan to continue beating the eggs/sugar over boiling heat (definitely not for the faint of heart).

Once that process is finished, the icing resembles fluffy divinity.

Slap some of that sugary goodness on each cupcake and you’ll have something that looks a little something like this:

Naturally, you can’t have “confetti” cupcakes without confetti sprinkles!

Cute!

The Jolly Rancher chunks melted in the oven and gave the whole cupcake an interesting fruity flavor. There were no hard bits left and since the color blended, there were no bright, concentrated bits like you might expect from those commercial “Funfetti” cake mixes.

Overall, a fun way to ring in the new year (Or a new month. Or a birthday. Or for no particular reason at all.)

In September, I started a cupcake adventure. If you haven’t read about it yet, you can do so here.

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Whenever I have several batches of cupcakes to make, I start by measuring out my dry ingredients into labeled containers. It saves me a lot of time measuring and dividing.

As with most every recipe, you start by creaming butter and sugar, and then add the egg(s):

With Red Velvet cake, you use an obscene amount of red food coloring…this recipe called for 2 TB!

Obviously, all that coloring give the batter a killer shade of maroon:

Then, the dry ingredients are added.

As is the milk. You’ll notice that the dry ingredients include cocoa…Red Velvet cake is essentially just chocolate cake with a boatload of dye in it.

Here’s our batter, ready to be baked!

And here they are, fresh out of the oven!

The icing the author suggests for these cupcakes is similar to the one I use for most of my cakes: a buttercream made from shortening, powdered sugar, water, and flavoring (vanilla used here).

Once that was whipped up, I prepped my piping bag to make decorating a snap.

LOVE LOVE LOVE rosettes. They are so simple and so elegant all at the same time. And what’s NOT to love about sugar sprinkles?!

I also made some red buttercream and accented the rosettes with large white heart sprinkles.

When the icings started running low, I mixed the two together to create a swirl effect.

They looked pretty cute as a set, too. These did very well at my cousin’s bake sale. I guess everyone loves Red Velvet!

In September, I started a cupcake adventure. If you haven’t read about it yet, you can do so here.

***

Naturally, this recipe starts with creaming together butter and sugar (surprised?)

Then, eggs and the other wet ingredients are added:

The final batter had a nice, thick sugar-cookie consistency. (I realized later I had accidentally doubled the amount of butter required WITHOUT doubling the other ingredients. Oops! They still tasted good, but I made a second batch the correct way so I could compare the results of the two. It felt like Science Fair all over again.)

My aunt graciously loaned me her silicon baking mold. It was slightly bigger than most mini molds, and it worked BEAUTIFULLY! I need to get one of my own!!

As you can see, the batter made a LOT of mini cupcakes. I split this batch and only used about 16 for making Lamingtons and the rest for making cupcake kabobs (stay tuned for those). The ones with the double-butter are in the bottom left corner…you can see they are a little ‘lumpier’ looking.

Like the batter, the “icing” for Lamingtons is pretty basic as well: butter, cocoa, powdered sugar, and water (not shown here).

The water is warmed in the microwave and the heat melts the butter.

Then, the cocoa is added to make a paste.

Powdered sugar gives the paste some sweetness.

It can take a little trial and error to get the consistency just right. You want it to be about like brownie batter. It needs to be thin enough to slightly run off the cupcakes, but thick enough that it will stick.

Each little cake bite is submerged in the chocolate dip, then tapped to remove the excess.

Once the chocolate-covered cupcake has stopped dripping, you throw it in here:

PLOP! The cupcake is then rolled around, coating the chocolate layer with a dusting of shredded coconut.

Then the cupcakes are moved to a wire rack to dry.

Mmm. Just look at those! Taste-wise, they are very similar to the coconut-covered cake donuts at Dunkin Donuts. But smaller, and therefore better for you.

My husband and I ate all of these without ever considering the possibility of sharing with anyone else. It was a good thing I made a very small batch. I will definitely be making these again!

In September, I started a cupcake adventure. If you haven’t read about it yet, you can do so here

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What could beer possibly have to do with dessert?! Keep reading and find out!

This cupcake recipe interested me because it seemed so strange. You start by boiling some beer with butter and brown sugar (sounds healthy, right?).

You measure out your dry ingredients, including cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg.

You add the boiled beer potion to the dry ingredients…

and throw in a couple eggs to complete the mixture.

While the cupcakes are baking, you melt together more butter and brown sugar,

and bring it to a boil to make it syrupy.

Mmm. Peanuts. The second half of the equation.

The peanuts get added to the sugar syrup…

and make this delicious praline-like mixture.

Once the beer-batter cupcakes have cooled slightly, each one is hollowed out slightly in the middle to make room for the filling.

Mmm. The perfect treat to take to a football watch-party. Pleases the salt lovers and the sweet lovers in one punch!

Come to Mama!

In September, I started a cupcake adventure. If you haven’t read about it yet, you can do so here.

***

My cousin Claire asked me to help her with a school fundraiser by making several batches of cupcakes. Since I have several more recipes to work through, I was happy to oblige. These S’Mores cupcakes were a slight departure from the classic graham cracker/Hershey’s/marshmallow sandwich, but they lived up to their name where taste was concerned!!

Naturally, the recipe started with creaming butter, sugar, eggs, and vanilla.

This recipe was different from most in the sense that it used very little flour. Instead, crushed graham crackers made up the majority of the dry ingredients.

These dry ingredients were added to the wet ones.

And made a luscious graham cracker batter.

Next, a healthy scoop of chocolate chips was added. And by “healthy,” I mean generous, not good-for-you ;)

Mmm…look at that batter!

They baked up beautifully.

Next, egg whites were whipped with sugar until frothy and corn syrup was drizzled into the mixture.

The ‘icing’ was beaten until it formed peaks and resembled marshmallow fluff. Mmm.

Cute! Reminds me of my sister’s old Kewpie dolls.

Chocolate sprinkles rounded out the look:

Here’s what a S’Mores cupcake looks like before being bitten into…

…and after. Mmm.

I’ll be making these again for sure! The leftover marshmallow topping was also delicious as a dip for fresh fruit. Ask me how I know.

In September of 2009, I started a cupcake adventure. If you haven’t read about it yet, you can do so here.

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The following are terrific to make if you want to eat cupcakes for breakfast without feeling (too) guilty. They are more like a muffin and actually incorporate some fruit, so they aren’t as bad for you as the really yummy ones.

First, I mixed together the dry ingredients, which included nutmeg, one of my all-time-favorite spices. Mmm. It just smells like autumn, doesn’t it?

I measured out the applesauce called for in the recipe.

I zested a lemon.

And we mixed all the yummy goodness together with some (what else?) butter and sugar.

While my mixer was doing the hard part, I combined all the topping ingredients: sugar, flour, a diced apple, and chopped walnuts.

I also measured out the walnuts and cranberries for the batter.

The batter resembled a nutmeg-y cookie dough. Mmm!

The cranberries and walnuts were thrown into the mix before they knew what hit them!

A little bit of batter was blopped out into 24 muffin papers (the recipe says “Makes 18″, to which I reply: HA!)

A little bit of butter was melted down…

and the topping ingredients were added…

to make this lovely mixture:

I put a small dab of topping on each blop of batter and the cuppies prepared themselves for the heat.

Mmm. If raw eggs weren’t so risky, I’d probably just eat them like this:

But, they are EVEN BETTER if you can wait for them to bake. Mmm. I might have to make these again soon!

In September of 2009, I started a cupcake adventure. If you haven’t read about it yet, you can do so here.

***

The ingredients for these cupcakes look more like breakfast ingredients than anything, so I suppose the following could also be classified as muffins. And as such, you can eat them for breakfast!

Here are the batter ingredients:

And here are the topping ingredients. Not too different.

Ahh, here we go. The infamous creaming butter and sugar shot.

Oatmeal is obviously a critical part of this recipe, given the title and all.

And when you combine oatmeal with brown sugar and butter…

You get a yummy, crumbly topping!

Once your ingredients are creamed together,

a little bit of oatmeal makes for a nice batter.

But before they are ready for the oven,

A dab of strawberry jelly must be added.

And covered with more batter.

Look at those. I should’ve KNOWN they would overflow in the oven. They are already full! Have I not learned ANYTHING?! Somebody slap me.

But they just look so pretty! Too bad we aren’t done yet.

What did I tell you…overflow. Sheesh.

At least when something looks this goofy, it still tastes good. If I make these again, I’ll probably divide the batter to twice as many liners!

In September of 2009, I started a cupcake adventure. If you haven’t read about it yet, you can do so here.

***

Today is my cousin Zoe’s birthday. For my entire life, she’s been one of my very best friends. Since she lives in Seattle and I can’t be there to bake her a birthday cake, this blog post will have to do.

I love you, Stinky!! Happy 28th!!! Try to imagine these cupcakes on the screen are real…just for you!!

Let me say this up front: these cupcakes were WAY fussier than anything I would normally make. But, since we’re pretending these are for Zoe’s birthday, they were well worth the fuss.

The first step was to put a vanilla bean in some milk and boil it just slightly, then let it cool for a while.

While the ‘cooling’ was happening, I got to work creaming the butter and sugar.

Next, the recipe said to split the vanilla bean and scrape out its insides.

That’s vanilla, not pepper.

Dry ingredients were combined with the butter and sugar.

And the vanilla milk was added to make mashed potatoes!! (only kidding).

While the batter was baking inside it’s cute little papers, I was boiling a cocoa/sugar syrup for the icing.

Once it reached the appropriate temperature, the syrup was removed from the heat, placed in a pan of cool water and whipped with a hand-held mixer. (Are you seeing the fussiness yet?)

The result:

So I had these lovely cupcakes with no topping:

And I dressed them up with some cooked chocolate fussy-pants icing and some chopped peanuts.

In all, they were really cute and pretty tasty…but they were sure a lot of work. There has GOT to be an easier way to make chocolate icing!