July 11th Cupcakes

I have a lot of cutters.

I have heart cutters, star cutters, triangle cutters, clover cutters, pumpkin cutters, ladybug cutters, about 15 different flower cutters, leaf cutters, moon cutters, bowtie cutters, body part cutters, frog cutters, car cutters, hot pepper cutters, crown cutters, dinosaur cutters, plane cutters, alphabet cutters, and that's just the tip of the iceburg.

So it was with utter disbelief when I realized last night that I don't have a single fish cutter.

BF is taking his advanced diving class this weekend, so he's doing five dives and pretty much only coming home to sleep. He called me from the dive site last night and said it he would love a cupcake when he came home.

And for me, any excuse is a good excuse to make cupcakes.

So I was going to make them aqua blue with little fishes in all different colours in keeping with the whole ocean theme of his weekend.

But it was not to be. I could have molded them by hand of course, but I was working on another set of cupcake decorations earlier in the evening, so I didn't feel like doing that much work for this set. So he got hearts instead :P

Since these were especially for BF, I made beer & chocolate flavoured cupcakes. I used the recipe from Crazy About Cupcakes (have I mentioned how much I love this book?). The batter was so liquidy that I thought for sure that they were not going to turn out, it was like soup. But omg, these are the moistest, softest cupcakes I've ever made. The texture is incredible, and for once I managed to fill the muffin cups so that the cupcakes all rose to the perfect height.

I don't care for beer, so I found the taste of these so-so, but BF really liked them. I'm thinking about making these again but using soda instead. Maybe orange or cream soda. Does anyone know if this will work?

I went to make frosting and realized I was missing some ingredients, so I ended up using cream cheese frosting instead since I had some in the freezer. I used Wilton Teal icing gel colouring to get the blueish shade.

For decorations, I made some fondant hearts for the teal cupcakes, and sprinkled Skor bits on the white ones. They're pictured here all packed up in foil trays for BF to take to his diving class.

Saturday Morning Cupcakes

BF kept telling me that I should learn to make cakes from scratch rather than using cake mixes if I ever want to get good at baking, and of course he's right, so this morning I made my very first batch of cupcakes from scratch. It made like three dozen. Here's a few of them in a box (I give a lot of them away because there's no way BF and I can eat that many!)

They are zucchini cupcakes (I had two that didn't make it into bentos this week so I needed to use them up) with maple cream cheese frosting. The frosting is a little sloppy because I was a bit rushed to get them done before my swimming lesson. They're definitely yummy, but they're a little heavier than using a cake mix, so I still have some learning to do.

I decorated them with some maple leaves I made from fondant. I used pale green fondant, drew veins in them and painted with diluted red food colouring to give them a textured colour. On the pink ones (I'm still figuring out how to make dark icing without a wonky taste so that's why they're not red), I sprinkled Skor bits, and on the white ones I drizzled a little fresh maple syrup that my dad brought me from a maple syrup farm a couple weeks ago.