Cupcake Icing 101

I am not the best teacher but I had a great student -- April's first try at decorating cupcakes!

All before 11AM

I am not an early riser on Sundays (generally) but look at all I got done today...


made 20 babies...





transplanted the newbies...





And almost passed out of heat stroke. Why is it 90 degrees at 11am??

Wedding Cupcakes

Wedding cupcakes from last weekend. Chocolate with chocolate frosting and purple flake sprinkles. Vanilla with lavender icing with clear flake sprinkles.

Vanilla Cupcakes

Ok so I found a delish vanilla (white) cupcake recipe thanks to the fabulous Amy Sedaris. So I started playing with icing swirls this afternoon. I still need to work on the perfect lavender/violet shade and the stiffness of the icing but I have to say not bad for my first go at icing in many months!





I like the second one best -- more of a flat swirl....what do you think? Oh yeah I slipped a brown wrapper on as a test to see what it would look like.

Chocolate Cupcakes Test 2 & 3

Well two more tests today for the chocolate cupcakes. Both recipes came from the same nifty website -- Cupcake Bakeshop.



The first was a very simple old fashion chocolate -- delicious! Not too sweet very tender and the top was brownie like. I have to be careful about how much batter to put in the cups....an overflowing cupcake is not pretty to decorate. A tad over half full would be the best.



The second was a Devil's food and it is my choice. It is moist and not super sweet. Best of all it makes a pretty cupcake and will taste yummy with chocolate icing.

Now to find a few vanilla recipes to try...

Chocolate Cupcakes Test 1

I am practicing a few cupcake recipes in preparation for a friends wedding next month. Today I made trial 1 of chocolate cupcakes. I used a recipe off of the food network (this one). I did not make icing so I could really just taste the cake and make sure it was something good enough. Results -- really sweet, not sure I would want to eat it with icing, really moist, kids would love it, chocolate connoisseurs probably wouldn't. If I made it again I would probably toss in fruit or nuts and use them for sweet muffins OR follow the same recipe, serve them warm with whipped cream.