Princess (barbie) Cake for Jolie!

My niece Jolie turned 4 in May. Last year she had a Tangled themed birthday party complete with my cupcake version of Rapunzel's tower. This year her theme was any and all things princess, including a princess cake. She wanted ALL of the princess on her cake. Luckily for me, I talked her down to one princess with a cake skirt. In pink Aunt Kelly, PINK!! That I can handle!!

On my practice night, I realized that I had vastly underestimated the size my princess would need to be. Oops!

On with the skirt trials! I wasn't going for a specific Princess' look, I just wanted a very pretty, feminine skirt. Roses were cute, but we decided the ruffles were the best. I liked the purple/pink skirt, but was reminded by the birthday girl that it needed to be pink. PINK! So, skirt done! And the search for the perfect size princess begins.

  (I know they have dolls at Hobby Lobby for this exact cake, but I think they are kind of creepy!) I went first to Target, then Walmart but then by Toys R Us, I had decided that maybe she didn't actually have to be a Disney Princess. So, I grabbed a Fairy Barbie (who ended up losing her wings) and brought her home. The skirt now looks proportionate to her body, but now her legs are way too long!! Who would have thought princess searching would be this difficult?

UGH! So, easiest fix- make two skirts & stack them. As you can see on the left, I had to kind of shape the top layer so her skirt wouldn't look boxy. Luckily, all those pink piped ruffles covered alot!! 

I was super excited to show Jolie her princess cake!

And since all the guests couldn't eat off of Jolie's princess cake, I also made a Neapolitan rose cake. No one in my family can eat the same flavor of cake, so I figured three layers, each different, everyone will be happy! These rose cakes are so pretty & easy!

Here's the birthday girl with both of her cakes, because of course the candle couldn't go in the princess's skirt! She LoVeD them!! :)

Loved them so much that she was licking the icing off while we were singing to her. I did not eat a piece off that side!!

The Neapolitan was super yummy & looked really cool when it was cut! I am a strawberry/vanilla girl, so I gave my chocolate to my husband!

 And this is how the princess fared. Lucky she has any part of a skirt left after Jolie got a hold of her! That girl loves icing!!

So the party was a success & we had lots of left over cake! Makes me feel good to see something I've created make someone that happy!!

More Peanut Butter cupcakes

Can you tell my husband loves chocolate & peanut butter? Drew had an event at work that he needed cupcakes for, and that's the flavor combo he wanted, again. Not wanting to make the same exact kind twice, I hunted Pinterest for a new recipe. I found a couple that would work, but the best looked like this Pin for Peanut Butter ball cupcakes.

Instead of just dropping a Reese's into the bottom of a chocolate cupcake, she mixed peanut butter with powdered sugar, butter & vanilla to form peanut butter balls that would go into the cupcake.You chill the balls in the freezer for about 10 minutes & then they're ready to be added to the cupcake batter.

The frosting was a very rich combination of peanut butter, whipping cream, shortening, butter, vanilla & powdered sugar. Needless to say, it was really, really yummy!! 

I piped on the frosting with a swirl tip, topped with a mini Reese's and added a few sprinkles. I think they are pretty :)

Cupcake Party! - high heels, speghetti & angry birds

After some massive hint dropping, my husband bought me the newest Hello Cupcake book, cupcakes, cookies, & pie, oh my! for Valentine's Day! Love him :) I could not wait to get started on some of their newest designs, especially the high heels!! (I have a slight shoe obsession!) I called 3 of my favorite baker friends over & we had a cupcake party. We do it like this: I make all of the cupcakes & at least one batch of buttercream frosting. Each guests brings over a can of store bought icing (we're going for looks at these, not taste), a design they have picked & all the ingredients needed to make 12 of their design. We all make each design together & have three tries to get it right! When it's time to go home, everyone has 3 of each cupcake to take with them.

Tiffany has a 3 year old boy who loves speghetti, so this was her pick. They were super easy to make & ended up really cute! The "noodle" is piped icing done with a small round tip. The "meatball" is a chocolate candy & the "sauce" is strawberry jam. I'm thinking it wasn't the best taste combination, but it looked pretty authentic!

CUTE!

Jennifer's choice were the characters from the game Angry Birds. She got the idea off Pinterest. Each character was first flat iced and then dipped into solid sprinkles, color depending on the character. The mouths were all made out of marshmallows, the eyes were mini marshmallows with mini chocolate chips, eye brows (?) of licorice, nose/beak from orange candy slices & the feathers were jelly beans.

One of the teachers at Drew's school loved the pictures he showed at work on Monday, so I actually made them again that week for a birthday party. Drew said the ones we made for the party (below) are more correct, because thier faces are to the side, like they are flying, which they do in the game. I have no idea- I don't play it! I just think they are cute!

Next up were my high heel cupcakes!! Not surprising, my design choice was a bit ambitious, but I am in love with them!! The shoe can go from a pump to a peep toe by removing a semi-circle of cake right at the tip of the cupcake. The heel is a pretzel stick, and the sole of the shoe is a grahm cracker, cut into a triangle then dipped in white candy coating. All three pieces are glued together using the same candy coating. It took a little trial & error to make them actually stick, but it was worth the work!   

Here's a side view. Yes, they are a little messy, but it was late & we were a little giddy on all the sweets we had been consuming!

 Here are 5 of our favorites. I'm apparently not real good at free handing zebra print. Something that I'll need to work on for next time. Aren't they aweomse?!

Next up was Kinsey, who wanted to try sheep cake pops. She had never done cake balls before and they ended up being too much work for the amount of time we had left. We decided to save those for next time!

And we forgot to take a group shot of all the cupcakes with the four of us! O well- have to do it again soon!

I LOVE cupcake parties!!

Reese's Peanut Butter Cup Cupcakes

These cupcakes aren't that exciting & I have no idea what I made them for. But ever since I made Martha Stewart's Oreo Cheesecake cupcakes, Drew has been obsessed with trying to come up with all these candy/cupcake combinations to try. Most of them sound good in theory, but wouldn't really work. So to give him what he wanted, we made these easy Reese's Peanut Butter Cup cupcakes.

Make the chocolate cupcake recipe of your choice. Stick a Reese's PB cup at the bottom of each cupcake wrapper. These were the miniature size Reese's. I had wanted the next size up, but that's what you get when you send your husband to the store. And since I didn't have to go, I decided these were perfect :)

Pour the batter on top of the Reese's, then bake at normal temperature/time. I made a new chocolate frosting for these but I can't find the link to the recipe. It was really good!

I keep forgetting to use this stand when I take my pictures! Drew took me to a pottery painting place in College Station for my birthday. I made a cookie platter for Christmas & he made this little cupcake stand for me. It is Awesome!! I need to get a better picture of the rest of it. The stand itself is pink with white polka dots & the bottom & top both have a Drew drawn cupcake on them. I loved it!! And it's perfect for displaying cupcakes!

Thanks Love!

Hi Hat Cupcakes

Drew asked me to make cupcakes for him to take to school. I like to use the teachers at NISD as guinea pigs so I began my Pinterest search for a fun new cupcake idea. Success! I found this Pin for Hi Hat Cupcakes. The original post is from Martha Stewart. Hi Hat cupcakes are chocolate cupcakes, with a marshmallow icing, dipped in chocolate, like a DQ dip cone. I've never made a marshmallow icing so I was a little worried about getting the consistency right and really worried about then dipping it into melted chocolate. I wasn't real sure this was going to work!

I followed Martha's recipe for the cupcakes, they were easy. I then got to working on the iffy part, the marshmallow icing. After you mix the ingredients together, you have to beat it with a hand held mixer over boiling water until stiff peaks form. According to Martha,12 minutes, mine took closer to 20. I can't stand still that long, so I enlisted my helpful husband. He looks like he knows what he's doing right? :)

After the frosting thickens, transfer it to a piping bag with a large round tip. Pipe the icing into a spiral on the cupcakes as high as you'd like. Or in my case, until you run out!  

 Some of my spirals got a little wonky, but they were fun :)

Stick the cupcakes into the freezer while you melt the chocolate coating.

The key to the chocolate coating not melting the frosting is to wait until the chocolate has cooled before you try to dip them. Also make sure your chocolate is in a bowl that's deep enough to accommodate the entire spiral so that it doesn't get flattened in the process.

I think these are so cool! The teachers loved them! Drew was supposed to take a picture of one after it had been cut in half, but he forgot :(. O well, we'll just have to make them again to see what the inside looks like!

Great idea Martha, thanks!

Heart in a cupcake re-do!

The weekend before Valentine's Day we were headed down south to my parent's house and I wanted to take my niece & nephew a little something. It was the perfect chance to get my heart in a cupcake fail corrected! This time, I took my time (and step by step pictures) and it worked! I also decided to use my newly learned rose piping skills on these cupcakes as well. Very happy with how they turned out!

After you mix the batter, separate 1/3 of it out, color it & bake in a square baking pan until just firm. Wait until the cake is fully cooled. You can stick it in the fridge or freezer to expedite this. After it is cooled, use a small cookie cutter of your choice to cut out the cake that will be the centers of your cupcakes. Since it's Valentine's Day, I of course chose pink hearts.

I tried to cut out as many hearts as possible.

 Here are all of my hearts ready to go into the cupcakes!

Place a dollop of batter in the bottom of each cupcake liner. Then place a heart in each, piping batter around the heart until the liner is 2/3 full.  

 IMPORTANT- make sure all your hearts are facing the same direction! And that you remember which direction that was!

Here's what they look like right out of the oven. I have no idea why the hearts floated to the top. I followed the tutorial & hers didn't seem to. Maybe my hearts are too thick or my dollop at the bottom was too much.

When icing- remember to keep all the cupcakes facing in the same direction as they were in the pan so you know which way the heart is facing! If you don't, see my last post & the blobs they will look like when you cut them!! All that hard work for nothing....

Anyway, I used the rose piping technique from the cake post on these cupcakes. Using a 1M tip, start in the middle & swirl around to the outside. Easy Peasy.

 I added some white sugar sprinkles and the shiny finishing glaze. Aren't they pretty!! :)

 This is the first one we cut in to for my grandmother. I did it!! There's a heart!! In hindsight, I probably should have done the icing a different color, maybe red. With the heart sticking out the top of the cupcake, the top of the heart gets a little bit lost in the icing. O well, at this point I'm just excited you can actually see a heart!

 And here's my niece Jolie with her cupcake. You can really see the heart in this one :)

And yes, she loved them! Spoiled girl, she thinks every time Aunt Kelly comes to see her cupcakes are coming as well. What can I say? If she asks, they probably always will!

And not to leave her little brother Cade out, I made my first ever blanket thanks to this Pinterest post.

 It has minky fabric on one side & a really cool kind of western print on the other. It was soo soft! My husband wants one for his recliner. I'm thinking it will have to be much bigger than the one I made for Cade!

Love him!!

And since it went over so well, I decided to make one to send to our cousin's month old little boy West.

All in all, Valentine's Day was a success!! Drew & I decided to do something different and had an at home date night for ours. It was almost a disaster due to my favorite Italian restaurant not doing take-out that night, but Carino's, cupcakes & my handsome husband saved the night!

Hope yours was good as well!

Valentine's Day goodies

Happy Valentine's Day! (in May) I didn't decorate too much for Valentine's Day. Maybe I was a little burned out from Christmas. Well, whatever. I did make a new deco mesh wreath for our front door. The red/pink color combo was a little hard since we have a red front door, but I think it turned out lovely :)

I might not have felt crafty, but I was ready to get back to baking! I had seen some really cool new things on Pinterest that I wanted to try. My friend Kinsey came over & we had a Saturday morning bake date. I am a tad ambitious, so I had five different pins I planned to get done. Sadly, we only got to four & one was a FAIL due to me trying to do too many things at once!!

After seeing this Pin, I knew I had to figure out how to do this rose cake! I loved it! The tutorial said it would be really easy. I didn't believe it, but it really was! You use a large star, 1M tip & just do swirls, but backwards. You start in the middle where you want your flower to be & swirl out & around. Super easy!

Here's a shot of the cake in progress. We were really shocked how well this was working!

Instead of doing the swoops in the empty places between the roses like the tutorial, we went with the little stars blobs.

We then went back & added edible sugar pearls. If it looks a little shiny, it's because we used an edible sparkly glaze. I think the whole combination makes it an even softer & more romantic look. Isn't it pretty? :)

Our next decorating attempt was ruffles, as seen in this Pin. The tutorial says to use tip 104, holding the narrow side of the tip towards the cake & the wider side towards yourself. You then just pipe in vertical columns working back & forth. It was really easy, but our cake wasn't tall enough to really get it going.  

Since we were having so much fun with the roses, we decided to finish the ruffle cake off with roses on the top. And yes, our ruffles look a little fat. I think the icing had gotten a little warm at this point so they weren't as crisp as they would have normally been.

Here's a better look at the whole cake. Cute, but not amazing.

Next up was this super cute & easy red velvet cupcake design I found pinned by Martha Stewart. This was probably the easiest of the day, but still a very pretty cupcake. Start by baking red velvet cupcakes. Since we were just playing this day, these were made from a box. After they have cooled completely, cut off the tops of the cupcakes with a serrated blade. Punch a heart shaped hole out of the cupcake tops with a small cookie cutter. Then spread a thin layer of icing on the cupcake before replacing the tops. Fill the heart with more frosting & then sprinkle with powdered sugar.

Like I said, pretty easy & super cute!

Our last pinterest decorating attempt of the day is where my failure occurred. See that Pink blob inside the cupcake that's been cut in the half? "What's that?", you ask. Well, it's supposed to be a heart. But it's not. Because I wasn't paying attention. Here's how to do these correctly: Make your cake batter. Separate 1/3 of it into another bowl & add desired food coloring. Pour the 1/3 batter into a greased square baking pan. Bake only until it is firm enough to cut into, not the fully allotted bake time. Stick in freezer to quicken cooling. When the cake has cooled, use a heart (or whatever shape) cookie cutter to cut out shapes from the colored cake. Put a dollop of the remaining 2/3 cake batter in the bottom of each cupcake liner. Then stand the hearts up vertically in the liner, filing around the heart with remaining batter. Make sure all your hearts are facing the same direction in the pans. Bake cupcakes as directed. And here's the part I screwed up- when removing the baked cupcakes from the tins, make sure you remember which way the heart is facing & line them up in the same order on your cooling rack. If you don't you will not know which way the heart faces, which results in not being able to see an actually heart when you cut the cupcake in two. You just see a pink blob.(above picture) Is it possibly the side of the heart? Regardless, it's not something you can fix after you've made this mistake. You can cut into as many as you like (we tried 4), but at that point it's just dumb luck if you happen to cut it right. We did not.  

We were tired of all the pink, so we went with purple & blue swirls to top our failed heart cupcakes. Pretty colors, but maybe more Mardi Gras.

The one we didn't get to, was this brownie, strawberry cake & vanilla icing Pin.

Doesn't it look pretty & Valentiney? Next year I guess!

Kinsey took half of everything home- thank goodness! And the rest I sent with Drew to school. He gave the cake to his teaching partner Mrs. Bruton, who had just celebrated a birthday. It worked out well!

We had a great day but after we finished I was crashing off my sugar high & didn't want to bake for a while. Or at least until the next week!