Arizona Cupcake

Diego and Dora Safari Cake

2011-10-17T12:14:00.003-07:00

My son's 2nd birthday sneaked up on my in no time at all! This year it seemed to be even hotter than ever, probably was, because here we are at the end of October and it's still too hot to enjoy being outside. Needless to say, we are ready to embrace "Fall" or at least look forward to what comes next when hopefully it cools off a bit! So we went with a pumpkin cake, which is one of Lincoln's favorite flavors. I used the same recipe that I used on the pumpkin cupcakes a couple of years back so I knew it was a sure thing. One of his favorite obsessions right now is Diego and Dora so I found this cake decorating kit online that I ordered that included the trees and cars and bridge you see on the cake. The website also had step by step instructions on how to create the look you see above. I wish I could take credit for imagining this, but at least I was able to reproduce it! It was actually really fun and relaxing, just following the steps, using the colors and piping tips it told me to, like painting by number or something. :-)

Pill Bottle Pharmacy Graduation Cake

2011-05-06T12:00:00.001-07:00

A friend of mine I went to high school with was graduating from pharmacy school and trusted me to make her graduation cake! I was very honored, and of course put a ton of pressure on myself to make it turn out the best I could for her. This was made with a big sheet cake on the bottom with a bunch of round cakes cut in half and stacked on their side on top if it. It was my first time working with that much fondant and rolling it out, but I think it turned out pretty good! She ordered the rice paper print out for the writing that was very easy to apply and the cake itself was red velvet. I was unable to make it to the graduation party but heard everyone loved it so I'm happy!

Girly Cupcakes

2011-02-05T12:22:00.002-07:00

So this is what happens when I wait to long before posting these up here. I remember making these for Sarina's birthday but I don't think I remember what kind they were, or really making them hehe. My poor brain... I think they might have been strawberry!

Dr. Suess Cupcakes

2010-10-17T12:05:00.000-07:00

For my son's first birthday we decided to go with a Dr. Suess theme. This was my very first time experimenting with fondant and painting on fondant. I felt like a little kid playing with silly putty, that part was awesome. I made the fondant using a recipe I found online using marshmallows so it was pretty easy to work with. I had a little trouble with the black paint and getting that just right but I learned it was probably because my fondant was a little too greasy in some places. Half of the cupcakes are chocolate and half are carrot cake.

All Wigged Out!

2010-07-17T23:39:00.002-07:00

So in my attempt to get out of the house and be around other human beings with teeth, who can speak, and don't crap in their pants, I joined a couple of meetup.com mom groups. The first meetup I went to was for the group "crazy fun moms and families of the southeast valley". I was happily surprised to find out that they are in fact both crazy and fun. I tried to gain acceptance into this new group by bringing cupcakes that matched the theme of their get together, which was "all wigged out". It seemed to work. Either that, or they liked my financial contributions to LeftRightCenter and Bunco, neither of which I won, and if you know me, you know I really really like to win :-) But at least they were games of pure luck, those I don't mind losing AS MUCH because it doesn't say anything about my abilities. Maybe one night they will play Fooseball or Risk or Scrabble and I can show them who not to mess with MUAH HAHAHA. Anyway, these are my wigged out cupcakes. Pretty simple chocolate cake and cream cheese and chocolate frosting. Not much to explain beyond that!

Robin's Egg Cupcakes

2010-04-08T22:19:00.003-07:00

There was a sale on Robin's eggs and when I combined that with my coupons I got 3 bags for $1! So I decided to use my new candies to create my Easter cupcakes! The flash is a little bright in this picture, but the bottom layer is actually green. I could not do this in an assembly line fashion because once the green dried, the eggs wouldn't really stick to it, so I had to make one at a time. After I stuck the eggs on, I quickly piped the nest with a tip that creates the effect shown above. After the frosting dried they stayed on quite well, and tasted pretty yummy too I might add!

Superbowl Cupcakes

2010-02-08T07:51:00.003-07:00

I made these yesterday in honor of the only Football game I watch per year. I like how the Saint's logo is the Fleur de Lis since I just piped those onto the French cupcakes. (I'm a pro now). They are just plain yellow cake and Stephanie made the delicious frosting. Yet another excuse to bake cupcakes!

Wedding Cupcakes

2010-01-28T23:01:00.008-07:00

My best friend Stephanie got engaged quite some time ago. She worked her ass off (literally) to put this wedding together. She made all the food from scratch. She made 3 different kinds of favors, the invitations, save-the-dates, and she planned to make the cupcakes. She just wanted me to make little candy snowflakes to put on top. So I used melting vanilla candy wafers and piped little snowflakes (200 of them) onto wax paper. Then she asked if I could frost the cupcakes. Then she asked if I could just make them lol. I was glad to help and be able to take credit for my first official wedding cupcakes! (In my eyes this makes me a professional). There was an actual cake that went with these cupcakes that was 8x8. The whole presentation was awesome. For some reason when I try to upload the picture of everything it turns it on its side and won't let me rotate it back??? You'll just have to tilt your head... Either way, they looked good, they tasted good, and we were all happy the way the night turned out!

Gingerbread Cupcakes

2009-12-09T18:05:00.003-07:00

I know I say this a lot... but these are the BEST TASTING CUPCAKES EVER! I got the recipe from my Hello Cupcake Book. You use a box of cake mix, some buttermilk instead of water, 4 eggs, molasses, nutmeg, ginger and cinnamon. They are so delicious mmmm. I decorated with piped frosting because it is easy and familiar and added some festive sprinkles. I will definitely use this recipe again!

French Cupcakes

2009-12-08T12:36:00.002-07:00

The first cupcakes I've made since Lincoln was born! I made these for my sister's last day of French class. Nothing too fancy, just piped on some Eiffel Towers and Fleur De Lis. The holidays are almost here though so more cupcakes will be coming soon!

4th of July Cupcakes

2009-07-04T19:28:00.003-07:00

I usually end up making my cupcakes in a hurry but these I probably did in record time. I decided to make them just a couple of hours before I had company over. I went to the store and found some 4th of July wrappers and grabbed m&m's and some licorice really having no idea what I was going to do. From the time I got home until they were completed took me about an hour. I made 2 of what is pictured above for a total of 24 cupcakes, 12 for me and my guests and 12 for my parents and theirs. Once I decided to use the flag as my inspiration it went by very quick!

Operation Cake

2009-05-23T15:36:00.003-07:00

I made this cake today for Stephanie's son, Weston's, birthday. Just like most everything else I try to do, this was a little harder than I thought it would be. I used all frosting here. If I had to do it over again, which I doubt I would, I wouldn't do it the same way. Instead of spreading the frosting out, I would put little stars to fill in the spaces like I did on the Nascar cake so it looks more uniform. It was really hard to get the frosting smooth and in all the right places here. But probably the best way to do this cake to make it look good would be with fondant. I have yet to experiment with it but wow would it be so nice to just cut out shapes and lay them on the cake. This one would be really cool because you could just cover it in red frosting, then put the guy right over it with the holes pre-cut out. Everything would be so neat and smooth and perfect... I also didn't do the tweezers. I contemplated it, but I decided to write the happy birthday there instead. ANOTHER thing I learned doing this cake... is the cakeboard. I don't think I will use that again unless I am dealing with white frosting. I made kind of a mess on the board and it doesn't just wipe off like it does with the plastic I normally use. It looks like the poor guy was bleeding all over the place. But in this case I suppose it is kind of fitting seeing how I have been cutting holes into him all day...

Wedding Shower Cupcakes

2009-04-29T18:25:00.003-07:00

I made these for my sister's friends wedding shower, which I obviously did not attend, because had I attended, I would have put them on the tier correctly and not ruined all my hard work by putting the cupcakes in the wrong place making it look lopsided and stupid and putting the leaves upside down so you couldn't see the detail. Everyone thinks I am over reacting and it might be the hormones from being 15 weeks pregnant, but if you spent 6 hours putting a lot of detail into decorating something and counting things out and making everything just perfect, someone screwing it all up in 5 minutes... well... it gets to me. Look at the tier. If you have 1 type of a cupcake, you put it on top, 4 cupcakes of a different sort, well that would be on the second tier. 8 of another would be on tier three. It is not rocket science, it is simple logic and NOBODY there thought that maybe this looks a little odd? No, everyone thought it looked great. Imagine what they would have thought had it actually been put together correctly??

Sunflowers

2009-04-29T18:17:00.003-07:00

I made these for my Grandmere's birthday last month. Well I made other ones that didn't look as good because, once again, I completely underestimated how time consuming they would be to make and was completely rushed. The petals are hard to do when the icing melts in your hand, so you have to keep putting the icing in the fridge for a little bit and taking it back out.

Snoopy Cupcakes

2009-01-02T09:03:00.006-07:00

My mom really likes the Peanut's characters so a few months ago when I found Snoopy cupcake wrappers I had to get them. I made these for her birthday. They aren't incredibly fancy, but I think they turned out kinda cute :-)

Raspberry Coconut Cakes

2008-12-26T08:22:00.002-07:00

I have a new favorite cupcake! I made the cakes with shredded coconut, sour cream and frozen raspberrys in the batter. Then I topped it with a cream cheese frosting with some coconut extract. My frosting was a little more watery than I wanted, but it worked b/c I just dipped the cakes in the frosting. I baked some flaked coconut to stick on the outside and garnished with fresh halved raspberries on top. Yummmm. And NO I didn't think of it on my own. I got this recipie from a book appropriately titled Cupcakes.

Snowmen and Trees

2008-12-23T08:16:00.002-07:00

We are having a potluck at work today so I had another excuse to make cupcakes! I got this idea from my Hello, Cupcake book. I tried a new recipie for the big cupcakes and made devil's food cake. Before I put them in the oven I put a Milky Way bar in the center. What the recipie fails to mention is that if you push the Milky Way bar all the way down it melts and kind of burns on the bottom. So if you try it, make sure to only push it in a little and the rest of it will rise up around it. The smaller cupcakes are just regular yellow cake. The tie and scarfs and ear muff band is made out of Starbursts that I rolled out and the sides of the ear muffs are M&M's. I gotta get back to work now, but look for a new post coming soon for Christmas!

Banana Caramel Cakes

2008-12-14T20:05:00.003-07:00

This one was fun. Messy, but fun. I got this recipe out of Pamela Clark's book Cupcakes. It is basically banana bread baked in a cupcake then cut horizontally into three pieces. Then in the two little windows you put caramel sauce and sliced bananas. I topped it with some whipped heavy cream with folded-in caramel sauce and those are supposed to be little curls of chocolate but they more look like crumbs to me. You really need a fork to eat them but they are actually pretty tasty!

Nascar Cake

2008-11-30T17:01:00.004-07:00

My friends sisters son turned 1 year old a couple of days ago and I thought I'd mix it up a bit and make a cake. I tried out one of the Wilton's baking pans already shaped like this car and copied their color scheme because I have no creativity. All I did was follow the directions that came with the pan and this is how it came out. I tried making the Wilton's buttercream frosting and it did not taste that great though. Very sugary and I will not be making that again.

Thanksgiving Cupcakes

2008-11-29T18:14:00.003-07:00

I made these for Thanksgiving this year and used them as place settings. I used gingersnaps for the fan with candy corn suck on their with icing and used some cut up marshmellows to keep them sticking up. The eyes I just made out of frosting and I put some fruit roll ups over the beak. Pretty fun and easy to make and way cute!

Dragon Cupcakes

2008-10-30T22:09:00.003-07:00

I asked Lexie what theme cupcakes she wanted for her birthday and she said "dragon". I searched the internet for pictures of dragons and ideas of how to make them into cupcakes and my favorite site I ran across was Cupcake Ninja I have a new favorite source for ideas! My ultimate goal is to not have to steal other people's concepts, but I believe that, in time, I'll get there. :-) These cupcakes were quick and super easy. I just used the three tips she recommended and free-handed it. Not a whole lot to explain. I like the concept though and I think I'll be making more animals out of frosting like this. It is a whole lot easier to work with than chocolate and much cheaper than going out and buying weird candies and cookies and twinkies like you need for a lot of the Hello, Cupcake cupcakes. I did get a new cake book in the mail, so my next creation will probably have some chocolate candies in it.

Pumpkin Cupcakes

2008-10-26T00:14:00.002-07:00

I made these cupcakes for my pumpkin carving party tomorrow. (Or maybe I am having the pumpkin carving party so I have a good excuse to make pumpkin cupcakes?) Either way, I am so happy with the way they turned out.

I have never put a huge emphasis on how my cupcakes taste before. They usually just taste like cupcakes. But this time, I made "pumpkin spice" cupcakes with real pumpkin and, you guessed it, pumpkin spice. I LOVE the way these taste! I think they are my favorite tasting cupcakes of all time.

I first saw the idea for this design in my Hello, Cupcake book that I'm obsessed with, and then I saw the same cupcakes on the cover of Family Circle magazine, only they used pretzels instead of green Twizzlers for the stems. I like the Hello, Cupcake ones better, but I did end up buying the magazine and getting this great recipe for a pumpkin pie. I made the first half of it tonight, so I'll put up a blog tomorrow when it's done and I have some pictures.

These cupcakes were the easiest so far to make. You just put on the frosting, roll it around in some orange sugar, make some indentions with a toothpick, pipe some lines in the indentation and stick on your stem. If I could go back and change one thing, I would have made less cupcakes with the batter and filled the cups closer to the top to get more of a rounded shape. I did my best to make it rounded with the frosting, but it's not quite the same.

Yorkie Birthday Cupcakes

2008-10-20T20:09:00.004-07:00

I spent the day baking again. I gave Chris my Hello Cupcake book to pick out what cupcakes he wanted for his birthday and these were them. They are actually much easier to make than they look. The hardest part for me was the frosting and food coloring mess that I made. I still have a line of black dye on my right arm. I hope I can get if off before work tomorrow!

So basically I made regular cupcakes and mini cupcakes. I started with a mini cupcake to make a head. For the ears and snout you need 2 mini marshmellows. You cut one in half and dip the exposed part in pink sugar and stick those on as ears using some frosting as glue. You diagonally cut the end off of the other marshmellow and stick it a little lower than center with the pointy side out. Then the fun part is making some different colors. I used white frosting and chocolate frosting and some black, brown and yellow food coloring. For the multicolored look, I put 2 different colors in one bag. I found that it was hard to get both colors in the corner and after I was about halfway through it started turning out the way I wanted. I cut an M shape into my ziplock bag and then made the fur.

Next you just put some fur on the big cupcake and stick the little one on top. Pretty easy!

Boobie Cakes

2008-10-15T21:24:00.005-07:00

So I started my new job at CDW on Monday and already I am learning a ton in training. I have a great feeling about the company and what they stand for. They even give one paid day a year for each employee to do community service! Another thing they are doing on Friday is a bake sale to raise money for breast cancer awareness. You know me, I just can't help myself when it comes to a reason to bake. And for charity, even better! Since they are letting us work from home Friday and Monday (yeah, they rock that much), I baked the cupcakes tonight to bring into work with me tomorrow.

I did strawberry cupcakes (because they are pink, duh), and frosted them with white frosting out of a pastry bag piled up like soft serve. Then I took a can of spray paint that is made for cake decorating and sprayed side-ways onto the cupcakes to define all the cool lines I made. I learned very quickly to put them on wax paper and pull up on the opposite side of where I was spraying to creat a sheild. This keeps me from painting the rest of my kitchen pink.

I needed ribbons to complete my theme so I made sugar cookies. This took some trial and error because I had no cookie cutters, I couldnt FIND a ribbon cookie cutter anywhere. Finally I ended up rolling up tiny peices of dough like a snake and just folding it over like a ribbon and flattening it out on the cookie sheet. Then I decorated with pink strawberry frosting, added some pink sugar crystals and outlined it with more pink frosting. Looking back, I think my outline should have been a darker pink and the sugar crystals should have been finer.

After everything was said and done, not counting shopping for the ingredients I spent 3 hours doing this! Like I said, I was trying out new things and working my technique but holy crap that's a long time. It went by pretty quickly though because I was listening to the final presidential debate in the background and looking up occasionally. Maybe I was a little distracted. I won't get too into it though, another time, another blog.

Actually I REALLY wanted to make little cupcake boobies because how perfect would that be? But after watching the sexual harrassment video and learning how we are supposed to be "professional" and "grown-ups" I figured it may be innappropriate and give a bad first impression. But maybe next year...

Waltzing Cupcakes

2008-10-10T21:47:00.002-07:00

Life's a Beach!

2008-10-08T11:22:00.003-07:00

Amber's birthday was a few days ago so I had Lisa and Stephanie come over to help me decorate beach-themed cupcakes. I made the sharks out of twinkies and the lifesavers out of powdered doughnuts. Both were dipped in microwaved frosting to get that smooth look. I wish I could say I was creative enough to think it up myself but I have to give credit to my new best friend, my "Hello, Cupcake" book. Check out their website at www.hellocupcakebook.com Other than that we used crushed graham crackers for the sand and the little sandals Stephanie made out of licorice candies. I was going to put umbrellas in there too, but I couldnt find them at the store.

Happy Birthday Chris

2006-10-21T11:27:00.000-07:00

I made this cake for Chris in 2006 for his birthday. It was the first Cake I baked and decorated from scratch. It looked much better than it tasted, but I had a great time making it!