Sweet Sixteen Cupcakes

My niece turned 16, on January 31, and her mom asked me to make some cupcakes for her celebration. She asked me if I could make some cupcakes with multi color frosting. Could I? Of course I can and I will make them super fun too. I had seem some pictures of multi colored cupcakes and had wanted to make them as well. So here was the perfect opportunity: Tie-dye cupcakes. So I made a regular cake, and divided the batter into 6 bowls and dyed each one a different color, pink, green, purple, yellow, blue, and orange. Filled the liners with spoonfuls of the different colors of batter and then baked them. They looked so cool even without the frosting. But of course, what is a cupcake without frosting, oh yeah, a muffin and there will be no muffins coming from my kitchen! So I made two batches of buttercream frosting and divided the frosting into 6 bowls and dyed each color. Oh and of course I have forgotten to mention that all of the mixing was done by my brand new Kitchenaid MIXER!!!!! Back to the cupcakes. So I striped a couple of bags with the different colors and gave it a multicolor frosting, which topped off the cupcakes perfectly. I was really proud of how they turned out, but most importantly my niece loved them.

The Winner is...

Thank you to all who voted for the future color of my Kitchenaid Mixer. Unfortunately, no one won, I picked a completely different color. And the winner is....Reef Blue!

It was a very hard decision, quite possibly one of the hardest decisions I have ever had to make :) A few of the colors I really liked have been discontinued so that made the decision a little easier, but it was still frustrating to decide on a color only to find out that it had been discontinued. So now that I own my very own Reef Blue Kitchenaid Mixer, my cupcakes will be extra delicious, my cookies will not be flat, cancer will be cured, and war will be a thing of the past.

Kitchenaid Mixer Fiasco

Most people buy a Kitchenaid Mixer with the intent that it will be the last mixer they will ever need to purchase. In the past month, my wonderful husband has bought me 3 Kitchenaid Mixers; and will probably be buying one more for me before the month is over. Have I started a business where I need 4 mixers? Nope, I'm just picky, and it comes down to the fact that it wasn't the right color. So here's how it happened. My husband decided, and rightfully so, that I needed to own a Kitchenaid Mixer, so he purchased this nice pink mixer. Then he remembered that I had mentioned seeing a beautiful purple mixer online and decided to return the pink one and get me my favorite color. So he searched online, bought me a purple mixer, nicely wrapped it, and put it under the tree for me. So on Christmas Eve, I unwrapped my new mixer. While greatly loving the fact that I had become the proud owner of a Kitchenaid Mixer, I was hesitant to share with my husband, that it wasn't really the right color of purple, and that I had seen this great purple mixer on the JC Penny's website. So I finally told him, and he said that he had searched all over for a purple mixer, but this is the only one he could find. We looked at the JC Penny's website, and it was still there, my beautiful mixer.

Now I'm sure all my male readers are saying, "who cares, purple is purple." But that just isn't true. Anyways, my awesome husband decided that he would get this one for me because it was the color that I wanted. So he calls Penney's to purchase it, and finds out that this color was discontinued a couple of years ago. I'd now like to take this opportunity to blame JC Penney's for the whole Kitchenaid Mixer fiasco. If they had updated their website, none of this would have happened. Curses on them for getting my hopes up and then stomping them into the ground. So we decided to look online to see if any place still sold purple mixers. And we found a website that still had the perfect mixer, we purchased it, rejoiced, and then realized the huge mistake we had just made. The website offered appliances that run on 220 volts, and as I learned, United States' appliances run on 110 volts. So that left us with two options: 1. move to Europe, 2. cancel our order. I voted for the former, the husband voted for the latter; I didn't win. Fortunately, we were able to cancel the order without any problems, but now I'm left with no Kitchenaid Mixer, and no clue as to what color of mixer I should get. So if you are really bored, I'm now accepting color nominations, go to www.everythingkitchens.com , view their colors and then tell me which one I should get, but don't pick light pink or boysenberry, we don't want to stress the husband out anymore than I already have :)

Napoleon Cupcakes, oh wait, I mean Neapolitan Cupcakes

I was pondering what kind of cupcakes I should make for my dessert loving friend's birthday celebration. I wanted to make something that I hadn't made before, and before I knew it, I came up with Neapolitan cupcakes. It was a little bit of a challenge to decide how to incorporate strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla all into one cupcake. After much deep thought, I settled on chocolate and vanilla cake, with strawberry swiss meringue frosting. I added some ghiradelli chocolate chips for extra flavor and frosting accents. I thought they were very delicious.


At one point while I was making the cupcakes, I remembered that I use to ask for Napoleon ice cream, and I would always get funny looks, but no one corrected me. I'm not sure when I finally figured out that the proper term was Neapolitan. Thank goodness I figured it out for these cupcakes!

A Birthday Wish

My mom's birthday was this past weekend. She made a special request for a dessert that she had loved as a child. She described a chocolate cake with a cream filling, it had a marshmallow type frosting, and then the whole thing was covered in a chocolate shell. I attempted to recreate this childhood dessert in the form of a cupcake. I first researched different types of filling and settled on trying a Chantilly cream. Chantilly cream sounds like it might be a difficult thing to make, after all it is French, but it was actually really easy. Turns out that is really just whipped cream, with sugar and vanilla, it was definitely good. I wanted to use a good frosting, not just marshmallow cream for the frosting. After a little bit of looking, I remembered that my Hello, Cupcake book had a 7 minute frosting, that has a marshmallow type texture/flavor. So we were set. I made the chocolate cupcakes, filled them with Chantilly cream, and then made the 7 minute frosting, which actually was more like a 10 minute frosting; and then the fun began.

I had decided to use some enrobbing chocolate to cover the cupcakes, but the enrobbing chocolate was old, and let's just say that once we got it melted, I'm not sure it ever was chocolate. So then we decided to try some magic shell that people put on ice cream. It kind of worked, it worked well for covering the frosting, but it became apparent that it wasn't going to cover all of the cupcakes. So then we melted some chocolate almond bark and dipped the base of the cupcakes in that. It was a very long messy process, and I will admit that I did have the thought "is all this work, worth it?"
I got the answer to my question, with the first bite, and yes, it was totally worth all the work and mess for this very tasty cupcake. I'm not sure if they were an accurate representation of my mom's favorite childhood dessert, but I think everyone enjoyed it. I know I did, in fact, I wish I had one right now...maybe when I fall asleep, I will get to eat one in my dreams.

Last tastes of summer

I have a hard time welcoming the cool days of fall and saying good-bye to the hot days of summer. So in the memory of summer, I made some key lime cupcakes. It brought me great satisfaction grating the limes, and squeezing them for every last drop of lime juice. I had intended to put lime curd in the centers, and decided to cheat and buy pre-made lime curd. Turns out, pre-made lime curd is NASTY. Because I want this to be an appetizing blog, I won't go into how disgusting it was. Needless to say, I didn't put any lime curd into the centers of the lime cupcakes. While the cupcakes were baking, I made swiss meringue buttercream frosting. That stuff is amazing, it is very light, not overly sweet, and can be eaten by the spoonfuls (yes, I ate the frosting in spoonfuls). After the cupcakes cooled, I frosted them, added lime peel, and topped the cupcakes off with a graham cracker. Such a cruel world, that I won't be able to enjoy the hot summers and delicious summer foods for quite some time.

That's A Lot of Cupcakes

"That's a lot of cupcakes," and "that's a lot of work," were common responses when hearing that I would make two hundred cupcakes, for a friend's wedding. My friend's wedding was anything but traditional, it was a rock concert wedding, with a band, groupies, and an internet licensed minister or should I say ministeress. With keeping with the theme of the wedding, I wanted my cupcakes to be unique too, so I made eleven different flavors. We had:

1. lemon cupcakes with lemon frosting
2. strawberry cupcakes with strawberry frosting
3. cherry cupcakes with limeade frosting
4. spice cupcakes with cream cheese frosting
5. chocolate cupcakes with raspberry frosting
6. Italian Creme cupcakes with cream cheese frosting
7. margarita cupcakes with lemon-lime frosting
8. chocolate cupcakes with chocolate frosting
9. orange cupcakes with orange frosting
10. vanilla cupcakes with vanilla frosting
11. chocolate cupcakes with chocolate cream cheese frosting

I think I went through at least 12 bags of powdered sugar, 8 boxes of unsalted butter, and half a gallon of milk, just for the frosting! Overall I had so much fun making the cupcakes, the wedding cake was a little bit more stressful, but I would happily do it all over again. Thanks Jenn and Cody for letting me provide your wedding with Katie-Cakes. Thanks also to my amazing husband and wonderful friends for helping transport the baked goodies. Couldn't have done it without you!