A few weeks ago, Shanna asked me if I would be interested in doing a guest blog as soon as she saw my boob cupcakes that I made for Mr. UPS (the UPS man) at my friends store. What a perfect month for it, October, Breast Cancer Awareness month!
If you can roll a ball of fondant, you can make a boob, or two, or three. Simply roll two equal balls of flesh colored fondant. Use a straw and cut out a tan circle, place on top. Make a ball out of a pinch of fondant and place that on the tan circle that you made with the straw. If you want to do some tattoo art, use Americolor dye, dip a toothpick in the dye and go start doing the tattoo. I find that Americolors are much easier to work with. It doesn't take as much dye to make rich colored fondant & frostings. One of my favorite tools I own is my Cricut Cake Water brush, only I fill mine with vodka. Vodka dries quicker than water and prevents the fondant from getting gummy. I use this as a glue instead of gumpaste glue.
Thanks, Shanna for allowing me to share with your readers! I hope you all enjoy these boobs as much as Mr. UPS did.
October is Breast Cancer awareness month and I am sure many of you have women in your family, or friends or maybe even yourself have been affected by this horrendous disease. I have an aunt that has and she is a survivor for several years now and a good friend that is a 10 year survivor. So in honor of this month my good friend Stephanie from the blog, sweetcreationsbystephanie, will be posting about some FABULOUS cupcakes she made that are perfect for this month. She will also post some fondant tips. She makes cakes and cupcakes for friends and family and as a hobbyist and not a professional her work is better than most professionals I have seen. Check out her blog and look at her amazing creations as well as tons of fondant tips!!
This is probably one of my shortest blogs as far as me babbling goes. Maybe. ha! I made graduation cupcakes for one of my husband's co-workers. She had two kids graduating one from college and one from high school. So I had lots of fun colors to work with. I searched "graduation cupcakes" and there really isn't a whole lot of creative differences when it comes to graduation cupcake ideas. So caps, diplomas and some little embossed fondant pieces with "Congrats Grads" and " Class of 2010" and some starts, sprinkles and glitter. These cupcakes were basic, vanilla and chocolate and all with vanilla butter cream. I am still looking for the ONE that perfect vanilla cupcake recipe. The chocolate I made was the one from my pomegranate chocolate cupcakesbut I altered the recipe and it is TO DIE FOR. My best chocolate cupcake I have ever made says me and the husband. This is now my GO-TO recipe. Still searching for that vanilla though. The buttercream is my basic fluffy vanilla butttercream which I divvied up for all the colors. I had JUST ENOUGH for all of them to do nice Wilton 1m swirls on, and with the little bit of each color I had left over I channeled my inner kindegartner and mixed all together to see what color I could make. Um. EW. It was like a faux chocolate color. Kinda grey, kinda purpely totally gross. ha ha. So here are the cupcakes, I TOTALLY forgot to take step by step pics so these are all finished ones. Preggo brain strikes again!!
The green and yellows are for the college graduation and the blue and reds are for the high school. I had some white with each to break them up and to give a few people the option to eat non dyed frosting. But not many. Ha!
I will post the chocolate cupcake recipe in its own post because it is THAT GOOD it deserves its own post.
Since I am silly and decided to work on my birthday this year I thought it would be fun to bring in cupcakes to share. I work PRN or "As needed" and a place I work for needed me on my birthday I said yes and was mad that I did since it was the warmest nicest day of the year so far. Murphy's law I guess. Ha ha. I decided to bake up some yummy buttery vanilla cupcakes to go with a NEW chocolate frosting recipe. I have a bout 4 different recipes and they are all GOOD just not the "ONE". Well neither was this one. It tasted great, but it was a lot more work for what the end result was AND I ended up having to alter it to get it to be stiff enough to hold a piped form and not melt and ooze all over. One of my favorite baking sites, Our Best Bites, posted about a new Chocolate Frosting Recipe, and I was really excited to try it. Different technique than my other frosting recipes that I have used in the past.
I started with my basic buttery vanilla cupcakes and doubled the recipe to make 24. Being that I am nearing the end of my second pregnancy I have full on pregnancy "brain" and forgot to take pics of the cupcake baking process except for this one..
Fresh out of the oven buttery vanillaey goodness.
But I did take LOTS of pictures of the frosting making process since it was so NEW to me. Our Best Bites also shows step by step but since I like to do that on my blog I did too!
Ingredients set out. Flour, sugar, cocoa ( I used GOOD cocoa too, Droste) butter, melted and cooled chocolate chips, milk
Milk, flour, water in a saucepan and bring to a boil constantly whisking until it gets to a consistency of a thin pudding. Or not. Mine NEVER boiled and when from liquid to THICK before I could even say " I just wasted good cocoa powder" ha ha
Way too thick BUT I think I can save it...
My straining the chocolate station. On the left the pan I cooked the frosting in, you can see the mixture stuck to the pan, the middle my strainer set over a bowl and my spatula, on the right my bowl and spatula used for scraping the chocolate mixture off the bottom of the strainer into the small bowl on the right. My arm was sore after 15 minutes of scraping. I had to add a little milk to thin it out so I could get all the chocolate scraped through so no solid parts were in the frosting.
Still a little thick and tasted JUST like chocolate pudding
Adding the mixture to the creamed butter
After mixing and adding in the cooled melted chocolate. The taste was AWESOME. Consistency well sucked. Like pudding. No WAY was it going to hold up to being piped. And I had made a bunch of fondant flowers as decors and wanted them to sit on top of pretty frosting swirls. So I added in more cocoa powder, some meringue powder and since the frosting wasn't overly sweet I added in a cup of powdered sugar. I just didn't want too sweet frosting. I then chilled it for a while to see if it would set up. It did BUT as I was piping it started to get back to that pudding consistency really quickly as it got closer to room temp. Surprisingly it held shape but you could tell it wouldn't hold up at anything warmer than 68 -70 deg. These were a frost and eat immediately cupcake.
This is the chilled frosting piped on. It didn't harden up like most buttercreams do when chilled so I could still pipe with ease.
With my fondant flowers I made the day before I baked. I used two of my 5 petal flower cutters and dried them in small painters pallets. They work great to hold the cupped shape. Let them dry out and then painted a little hologram disco dust on them
They looked pretty and tasted good, but the frosting was just TOO soft. So next time I make chocolate frosting I won't be making this recipe again. Sorry Our Best Bites!! I love you and make tons of your recipes sweet and savory but this one just didn't work for me!
Vanilla Cupcake Recipe
from my files
Vanilla Cupcake Recipe
Makes 12 – 14 cupcakes
Ingredients:
1 ½ cups cake flour
2 tsp baking powder
¼ tsp salt
1 cup sugar
1 stick unsalted butter at room temp
2 large eggs, room temp
1 ½ tsp vanilla
½ cup whole milk
¼ cup sour cream
1 vanilla bean ( optional)
Directions
Position a rack in the middle of the oven and preheat to 350 deg F. Line a standard cupcake/muffin pan with paper or foil liners
In a bowl whisk together flour, salt, baking powder. Set aside
In another bowl measure out the sugar and scrape the vanilla bean seeds into the sugar. Work the sugar and seeds between your fingers until the seeds are well mixed in and the sugar is very fragrant.
Cream butter and sugar in stand mixer on med speed until light and fluffy, 2-3 minutes. Add the eggs one at a time, mixing well after each addition. Bead it vanilla and sour cream.
Alternate the flour in 3 additions with the milk in 2 additions. Not waiting til all the flour is mixed in before adding the milk. Beating on lowest speed until just combined. Scrape down sides of bowl and mix on med speed for 30 seconds until no traces of flour remain.
Divide the batter evenly among the prepared cupcake cups, filling each about ¾’s full. Bake until lightly golden, when a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean or the top bounces back when lightly pressed. 16-20 min. Let the cupcakes cool in pan for 5 min then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely before frosting, at least an hour.
2/3 cup granulated sugar
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
3 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
1 cup milk
1 cup real butter, softened
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips, melted
Optional: Additional cocoa powder as needed
Melt your chocolate chips if you haven't already and set aside to cool.
In a small saucepan, whisk together sugar, flour, cocoa, salt and milk; bring to a boil, whisking frequently. Boil 1-3 minutes or until thickened like a thinned pudding. Remove pan from heat and strain mixture into a small bowl. Cool completely in the refrigerator or freezer.
When chocolate flour mixture is cooled, beat the butter until creamy, about 1 minute. Beat in the cooled chocolate mixture until well combined fluffy, about 1 minute. Finally add in melted chocolate and beat again until well combined and fluffy, about 2 minutes. If desired, add additional cocoa powder to taste, up to 4 tablespoons. Spread or pipe frosting on to cupcakes or cake.
Makes enough to frost 24 cupcakes.
Storage: Store unused frosting in fridge and bring to room temperature before using again. If needed, beat with an electric beater before using.
A few months ago I got an email from Kristen from POM Wonderful saying she came across my blog and loved it and wanted to send me a case of POM wonderful juice to use in a recipe and blog about. I have been trying to figure out what exactly I wanted to make. First off cupcakes of course, but what combo would work best with pomegranate? And for what occasion besides just because. Mothers day cupcakes came to mind because when I was a little kid one of my favorite things to do with my mom was go grocery shopping ( I know weird huh?) but I always KNEW I would get treats if I went with her. She used to joke that the grocery bill would be way more when I went with her. I wasn't the kid that screamed for cookies or donuts or candy at the store. I wanted pomegranates. There was just something so awesome about that big red fruit that I could peel away at and pull the little seeds out and nibble on all day. Little did I know back then how good they are for you full of fiber, vitamins, antioxidants etc. But then again does an 8 year old think about let alone know what an antioxidant is??
If I was to ever call a container of juice cute, these would be it. They're adorable. ha ha
I searched many pomegranate recipes online and I thought it was funny that almost all the ones I came across in other blogs they too had mentioned receiving a case of POM juice from POM Wonderful. I was torn between two recipes but since I have 8 cute little bottles ( well now 5 left) I can make several recipes. I first went with a white chocolate pomegranate cupcake and was going to do a pomegranate buttercream but the cupcakes failed miserably. I am not sure what happened exactly but the cupcakes FELL apart when taken out of the cupcake pans after cooling a few minutes. I had found the recipe here.The tops were a little crunchy and the middles were too moist and too light. They were more like a muffin than a dense cupcake and there was no way they were going to hold up under even the tinest bit of frosting.
Plus all the wrappers peeled off too. I threw them ALL OUT. I was so mad I almost didn't make a new batch. But I had worked really hard on these gorgeous fondant flowers for the decorations I had to make a new batch. I think these ones had either too much melted chocolate in the recipe or something was just off. Not sure. I debated making a box mix and adding in the pomegranate juice but I cringe at the thought of a box mix and it really is against my own personal baking religion. ha ha
So I decided on my basic vanilla cupcake and subbed pomegranate juice for the milk
Even with the juice added in for some reason they looked green...
I made a glaze of pom juice and powdered sugar and spooned over the tops of the cupcakes while still warm so it would soak in. They smelled like pomegranate just didn't look pinkish.
I whipped up a small batch of white chocolate swiss meringue butter cream and frosted with wilton 1M swirls
Decorated with my fondant flowers. I love these cutters and I got the veiner/mold I had seen on one of my favorite blogs that has a tutorial for these flowers. CakeJournal is the site and she has lots of great tutorials and all kinds of beautiful cake and cupcake creations.
I added pink luster dust to the light pink ones, I added pixie disco dust to the pomegranate colored ones. I mixed some different colors of fondant and added in some other colors to try to match the color as best as I could. They came out a little darker but I think they were a nice contrast with the light pink
So happy Mothers Day to all the amazing moms out there that really should be recognized daily not just one day a year. And thanks to my mom for always letting me get a pomegranate at the store when I was a kid and for being a great mom to me!!
Pomegranate Cupcake Recipe
adapted from my own vanilla cupcake recipe
makes 12 regular sized cupcakes
Ingredients
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
pinch salt
1 stick unsalted butter at room temp
3/4 c granulated sugar
2 large eggs room temp
1/2 cup plus 2 teaspoons pomegranate juice ( I subbed this for the milk and vanilla in my basic vanilla cupcake recipe)
Directions
preheat oven to 350 deg f, line a cupcake pan with 12 cupcake liners.
Mix the dry ingredients together in a bowl and set aside. Cream butter and sugar together in and electric mixer til light and fluffy. Scrape down the bowl. Add in the eggs one at a time making sure each one is fully mixed in before adding the next. Alternate the flour mixture with the pomegranate juice in 5 additions ( 3 dry, 2 juice) and mix until just incorporated don't over mix
Distribute batter evenly in liners in cupcake pan. Bake for 15-18 min. Test for done ness with a toothpick or by pressing lightly on the cupake and it bounces back. Cool in pan for 5 minutes, transfer to a wire cooling rack and cool completely. Frost when cool.
White Chocolate Swiss Meringue Buttercream
Ingredients
3 large fresh egg whites at room temp
1/2 cup extra fine granulated white sugar ( bakers sugar)
pinch of salt
2 sticks of unsalted butter at room temp cut into tablespoon sized pieces
3 ounces of melted and cooled white chocolate ( not chips but a baking bar) ( melting can be done in microwave or by double boiler method)
Directions
1. In a heatproof bowl, add the egg whites, sugar and salt, set over a pan of simmering water. Mix by hand constantly with a whisk, until the sugar has dissolved completely and an instant thermometer register 160°F. 2. Remove the bowl from heat, and beat with an electric mixer fitted with the whisk attachment on high speed, until fluffy and glossy and the bottom of the bowl feel cool to the touch. 3.With the mixer on medium-high speed, add the butter two tablespoons at a time; mixing well after each addition. Once all the butter has been added stop the mixer and scrape down the sides and whip on high a few minutes. If it looks like its not coming together keep beating and it will. Add the melted and cooled white chocolate, beat on high until smooth. If mixture looks curdled at any point during the beating process, continue beating until smooth; the curdling will disappear. 4. Transfer the buttercream to an airtight container and keep at room temperature if using the same day or refrigerate up to 3 days. Before using, bring to room temperature and beat with an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment on low speed until smooth.
A good friend of mine invited me to her little boy's birthday party and I offered to make his cupcakes/cake as part of my gift. She told me batman themed and blue, yellow and gray were the colors. Of course being that these were cupcakes for a 4 year old boy they had to be fun and bright. My friend said simple as far as cake flavor goes which worked for me since most kids only eat the frosting anyway. I made a white velvet cake and fluffy vanilla buttercream. I had a bat cutter from my Halloween mini cutter set but it wasn't the BATMAN bat shape so I found an image online, made a stencil and cut them out by hand. I have number cutters from Ateco but the 4 didn't have the cutout in the middle so I cut those out by hand also and they looked a lot better that way. I also made the cupcake stand. I wanted to do something besides just put the cupcakes on the table or on plates. With the help of my friend Steph and her cupcake stand tutorial on her blog, and the help of my husband for cutting out the foam boards I got the stand made pretty quickly. Hot glue guns suck though. I had glue everywhere. I am so not a crafty type so this was impressive just for me to accomplish. Ha ha
Okay cupcake time
This batter was a little thicker than my usual vanilla cupcake recipe but smelled really good. Tasted good too. Always have to have a little lick of the batter!
Love my oven I can bake two pans of cupcakes side by side and they all come out evenly baked
Perfectly poofed on top. I couldn't find grey cupcake liners so I went with the silver/foil. Close enough
Divided my frosting up in equal halves for the yellow and blue frostings. Didn't want to end up with more of one and not enough of the other or have to dye more and try to match it
Golden yellow, Royal blue and a couple of 1M tips
Just a little bit at a time. The color gets darker the longer it sets
Perfect. Batman blue!!
Came out more orangey than I wanted. Should have used lemon yellow. Oh well too late now
Sooooo appetizing right? ha ha
Half dyed yellow, I added blue sugar sprinkles to these
With the fondant batman bats
Closer look so you can see the sugar sprinkles
No I didn't have the lights on bright, the frosting was seriously this bright. I added yellow jimmies to these
With the fondant 4's. I had to make the grey fondant by mixing some black with white fondant
I made the birthday boy his own jumbo cupcake and wanted to do something cool with the frosting, do a two color swirl. I put equal amounts into 12" disposable bags and cut off the tips
Placed inside a 16" disposable pastry bag with an 1M tip, no coupler.
It came out exactly how I wanted. And I had made his name in fondant letters to go on the cupcake
Had to add a fondant 4
And a bat
I think these came out pretty darn cute. The birthday boy LOVED them.
My friend got this awesome candle for the cupcake so I am glad I made a jumbo one just for the birthday boy. Which of course he only licked the frosting off like I predicted!! I was bummed I couldn't find a jumbo silver cupcake liner for this cupcake. This was actually a vanilla bean cupcake I had made with the raspberry vanilla cupcakes I last posted about. The white velvet cupcakes made 24 and I didn't want to make two batches just to get a jumbo one or to have a bunch of leftover cupcakes. Not that that is a bad thing, but I don't need a bunch of extras in the house. Not when I have a giant list of fun flavors to make right now!!
White Velvet Butter Cake - Modified for Cupcakes Ingredients
- 4 liquid oz of egg whites (around 4 large egg whites)
- 1 cup milk
- 2 1/4 teaspoons vanilla
- 3 cups sifted cake flour (important! make sure you use cake flour and not all-purpose flour)
- 1 1/2 cups sugar
- 1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 12 tablespoons (1.5 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
Directions
Preheat oven to 350F and fill two 12-hole cupcake trays with cupcake wrappers. In a medium bowl, combine egg whites, vanilla and 1/4 cup milk.
In a large mixing bowl, combine cake flour, sugar, baking powder and salt and mix together to blend. Add the butter and remaining 3/4 cup milk. Mix on low speed until dry ingredients are moistened. Increase to medium speed (high if using a hand mixer) for 1.5 minutes. Then add the egg, vanilla and milk mixture in three equal parts, beating for 20 seconds between additions.
Pour the batter into prepared cupcake trays. Try to fill each cake with an equal amount of batter. Try using an ice cream scoop to help make scoops of batter even. Each cupcake wrapper will be about 2/3-3/4 full. Place trays in the oven for 15-20 minutes, remove when golden yellow and a toothpick stuck in the center comes out clean. Let cool for 10 minutes in the pan, then place on a cooling rack. Let cool completely before frosting.
Fluffy Vanilla Frosting
Ingredients
4 sticks of unsalted butter room temp
5 cups of powdered sugar sifted
1 tbsp vanilla extract
3 tbsp meringue powder ( optional I use it to help the frosting hold the piped shape better)
2-4 tbsp heavy cream
dash salt
Directions
Whip the butter til light and fluffy stopping to scrape down the sides every now and then. Mix the meringue powder and salt in with the powdered sugar. Add in the sugar half cups at a time, beating on high for 30 seconds or so after each cup is added, scrape down the sides and repeat til all the sugar is used it. Add in the vanilla and beat well. Scrap again. Add the cream one tbsp at a time until you reach consistency to your liking.
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