Flower cupcakes

I wanted to practice my piping skills so I decided to start with flowers. I picked three different types from my books & got started with chocolate cupcakes, yellow icing & chocolate sprinkles. My piping improved with every flower! I'm pretty proud of the way my first attempts turned out!

The sunflowers may be my favorite!! More flowers to come soon!

I scream, you scream! Ice cream cupcakes

we all scream for ice cream! I saw these on a blog & had to try them. They are cupcake ice cream cones. We baked strawberry cupcakes inside the actual cone, then used a regular strawberry cupcake inverted as the "scoop" of ice cream on top. Lots of strawberry frosting & sprinkles & you get the perfect sweet treat for summer! They were super yummy!

Lankford Anniversary- heart cupcakes

August 6th was my parents, Mary & Sam Lankford's 28th wedding anniversary. Since they were headed to College Station to spend their anniversary weekend with Drew & I, we thought the least we could do was to create some special cupcakes for them! My mom is a choc-o-holic so we decided to try a new recipe, brownie cupcakes. We went with purple icing because not only is it mom's favorite color, but it was the dominant color of their wedding 28 years ago. They were completely surprised & LOVED them!! Mom said she liked them so much because they were a "light" version of a brownie & not heavy like regular box brownies. They ate so many they almost didn't have any to take home to share with the family! 

 

You may have a surprise waiting for you if you decide to come visit the Self's!

Bible Study flower cupcakes

Our bible study class decided to have a small 'middle of the summer, let's catch up bible study' at my friend Kristi's house. Since she was hosting, she of course called on me to do cupcakes for the night's dessert. I had been flying alot that week so I didn't have time to do something super new & creative but I did have time to create these cute flower cupcakes out of suckers. I know that they are not the most amazing cupcakes but they got a really great response & they ladies LOVED them! Flavors of the night were strawberry & chocolate chip.

Cupcake Art! Flowers, apples & apple pie :)

After our first taste at decorating, we couldn't wait to try something new! Drew & I chose 3 different design ideas from our newest book, What's New Cupcake, got the materials & started creating! These cupcakes were all about using candy & other foods to create the designs. For the apples we needed tootsie rolls, red icing/sprinkles, chocolate covered donuts & sour belts. For the flowers we needed marshmallows & multi color sprinkles. The apples pies were created with M&Ms & icing.

Here are the finished products! I can't decide which one is my favorite.

Once again, we had extras so we gave them out. Some of the apples went to one of my favorite teachers Jennifer Powell, I took some to work, & the rest went to the college boys that live next door to us.

Decorating with tips

Before we decided to do our cupcakes, I hadn't used icing bags or tips in a VERY long time!! I had gotten lazy with our cookies & used Wilton icing pens. But we decided we needed to do these right, so I headed to Hobby Lobby & got lots of disposable icing bags, some couplers & a couple of Wilton decorating tips to try out. Our first try with the tips was more about learning how to pipe out of bags with different tips, pressure & homemade butter cream icing. Most of the cupcakes that we decorated that night were random designs. Some of them turned our pretty cute! So here are some pictures of piping night #1

I decided in the middle of our decorating to try one of the designs that I found in my Martha Stewart cookbook, a ladybug. I didn't have all the correct candy to fully create the ladybug, but I couldn't resist trying it out! So here is our almost complete butterfly cupcake!

So what to do with a whole batch of cupcakes that we made for fun? I took them to work!! They were super excited & thought they were yummy :)

My favorite things

Here are some of my favorite things that we use in our kitchen to make our Baby Cakes!

My mixer :) Of course it is PINK!! This was our wedding gift from my grandparents, Bodie & Pat Lankford

These are all a must!

all of my decorating tips! These were a gift from my Aunt Eileen

Our mixer gets used almost every other day. If it is not being used, it feels like something is wrong in the Self house! We also love going through the Martha Stewart book picking out all the new cupcake recipes that we want to try! So far, we've like them all! The tips are still relatively new to me. I am trying to learn what they all do. I have a couple that I'm really good at & they have become my go to tips. I can't wait to figure them all out!!