Cherry Cheesecake Brownie Cupcakes Recipe

The double dulce de leche cupcakes disappeared in about two minutes, and I got yet another cupcake idea last night, so I ended up making more this afternoon. At any given time I have a list in my head of at least four or five recipes I want to try, so maybe I bake too many cupcakes, but it's either that or fall behind! Although I got a lead on a good chocolate chip cookie recipe today, so I suspect that I'm no further ahead.

These cupcakes were inspired by a recipe for cherry cheesecake brownies that my Dad used to make when I was little. Don't let their humble appearance fool you. These cupcakes are dense, moist and packed with flavour. They're topped with a fudge frosting so rich that you only need a thin layer on top rather than a big swirl. Really, they don't need frosting at all.Here's the recipe. You should definitely try them!

One quick note about the recipe: I was running out of butter and cocoa towards the end of this, so I just threw together the frosting out of what I had. Feel free to use a different recipe, I just included this one for completeness.

Recipe: Cherry Cheesecake Brownie Cupcakes

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Makes approximately two dozen cupcakes

Ingredients:

Brownie Batter:

• 1 cup butter
• 2 cups white sugar
• 1/2 cup cocoa powder
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 4 eggs
• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

Cherry Filling:

• 1 8oz package of cream cheese
• 1 egg
• 2 Tbsp flour
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 2/3 cup maraschino cherries (chopped)
  

Chocolate Fudge Frosting

• 1/4 cup butter
• 2 (1 oz) squares unsweetened chocolate
• 1 lb icing sugar
• 2 Tbsp cocoa
  
• 4 Tbsp milk

To make the brownie batter, first melt the butter. Add ingredients in the order listed, mixing until combined after each addition. Mix flour, baking powder and salt together in a separate bowl before adding to the liquid mixture.

In another bowl, beat cream cheese and 1 egg with an electric mixer until light and fluffy (about three minutes). Add sugar and flour and stir until combined. Mix in cherries.

To assemble cupcakes, first put a small spoonful of brownie batter into each cup. The batter will raise while baking, so you only need enough to cover the bottom of the cups. Use a small spatula to spread the batter out to the edges of the bottom of the cup.

Spoon a generous tablespoon of cherry filling into each cup. If you have any left over filling, you can fill any empty spots in your muffin tin with it. Its not exactly a cupcake, but it tastes good.

Top with another spoonful of brownie batter. Using a spatula, gently spread brownie batter out to the edges of the cupcake cup so that the cherry filling is completely covered (add more batter if required). The cups should be about 3/4 full.

Bake for 23 to 25 minutes. Cupcakes are done when the top center of each cupcake is cooked.

To make frosting, melt butter and chocolate in a small bowl in the microwave, stirring every 30 seconds until melted and smooth.

Place icing sugar, cocoa and 2 Tbsp of milk in a large bowl. Add melted butter and chocolate and mix until smooth and uniform. Add remaining milk until the frosting reaches the desired consistency. Lightly frost the cupcakes using a smooth spatula or butter knife.

Here is a picture of what the cupcakes look like inside. As you can see, the batter rises up in the middle, while the cheesecake filling stays the same size, so it makes a stripe across the inside of the cupcake.

Double Dulce de Leche Cupcakes

Fall is almost here.

I've been in a bit of denial about it. I've been wearing tank tops despite the slight chill in the air. I've seen leaves on the ground twice while walking down the street in the past few days and both times I convinced myself that they must have been there since last Fall.

Foolish right? Well today I decided to give in. I'm still wearing a tank top, but the cupcakes I baked today are a tribute to the chilly season. I put aside the fresh fruit and light ingredients and traded them for dark chocolate and creamy dulce de leche. These are the richest, most decadent cupcakes I've ever made.
I call them Double Dulce de Leche. The cupcake itself is chocolate, made using the "Rich Chocolate Cupcakes" recipe from the book Crazy About Cupcakes. They are filled with premade dulce de leche (President's Choice brand, for all you Canadians out there) and filled using the method I used last time, removing a 'plug' of cake from the middle, piping in the filling and replacing the plug.

For those who aren't familiar, dulce de leche is a luxurious type of creamy caramel made from whole milk. It's delicious on everything from cake, to ice cream, to apple slices.

The frosting is a fluffy vanilla buttercream with more dulce de leche drizzled on top.

I cut one in half to show you the filling inside. As you can see, the seams from where the cake plug was removed are barely visible (I've never had anyone even mention that they noticed it while eating a cupcake filled this way), the filling is nicely centered and the amount of filling is controlled. Yummy!

Peanut Butter and Jam Cupcakes

Marlena over at The Repressed Pastry Chef is an incredible baker. So when she said she had found the best plain cake recipe of all time, I definitely took notice. When she tried this recipe, she made Napoleon cupcakes. I decided to make peanut butter and jam cupcakes out of mine.

The recipe for the cake is here. All in all, I think it's a good recipe, the cakes turned out really light and fluffy, but I think I prefer the golden cupcakes recipe from the book Crazy About Cupcakes which I used last time. For some reason, whenever I make recipes using cake flour instead of all purpose flour, they come out a little on the dry side. I wonder if I'm doing something wrong.

The cupcakes as a whole came out awesome though. Definitely some of the best ones I've made and they disappeared in a hurry. Seriously, I barely got a picture of these three. The recipe made three dozen regular cupcakes and a dozen minis, and I only have ten cupcakes left an hour after making them. I took some to my Mom's office, BF took some in to work and the neighbours stopped by for a couple. That's really good though, I'd much rather give them away while they're fresh than have them get stale.

The frosting is a peanut butter buttercream, here is the recipe:

1/2 cup butter (salted, room temperature)
1/2 cup smooth peanut butter
1/2 large bag of icing sugar (500g)
5 1/2 Tbsp milk

Beat butter and peanut butter on low until light and fluffy (about 3 minutes). Alternate adding icing sugar about 3/4 cup at a time, and adding milk 1 Tbsp at a time, beating until combined after each addition. You may need more or less milk to get a nice consistency. The frosting is pale in colour, so add a little brown icing colouring to it if you want it to be the colour of peanut butter.

The filling is a half and half mixture of vanilla custard (using BF's secret recipe) and raspberry jam.

I had a really tough time filling these cupcakes. I tried to pipe it in but I couldn't seem to get enough filling in each cupcake, and then when I tried squeezing harder, the icing bag blew up and I had raspberry filling all over the place. Luckily it only got all over four of the cupcakes. I couldn't help but laugh.

After that didn't work, what I ended up doing was to use a 1" round cookie cutter to punch a circle into the top of the cupcake about an inch deep. I slid a knife under the circle and popped it out. I sliced a small layer off the bottom of the section I pulled out, spooned about 1 tsp of the filling into the cupcake, and replaced the section I had cut out. It was actually surprisingly fast to do once I got going, and each cupcake was perfectly filled. The frosting hid the seam of where I had replaced the plug.

I'm really happy with how these ones turned out, and would definitely make them again!

Creamsicle Cupcakes

I decided to make some simple creamsicle cupcakes this weekend. There lots of ways you can make these (last time I made homemade marshmallow topping using this recipe), but I was feeling kind of lazy this time. And to be honest, my main motivation was to work on getting one step closer to finding the perfect vanilla cupcake recipe (If I ever find it, I'll be sure to post it!). I'm definitely getting closer.

These cupcakes turned out really delicious. For me, a good cupcake should have three qualities: Fluffy cake, Frosting that is either light and fluffy or deep and rich, and amazing flavor. I managed to pull off all three with this one.

For these cupcakes, I used the recipe for golden cupcakes from the book Crazy About Cupcakes and added 2 Tbsp orange extract and about 1/2 tsp orange rind to get a light creamsicle flavour. It's definitely one of the best cake recipes I've used yet. It manages to make a dense, cakey cupcake that is still light and fluffy.

The frosting is a vanilla buttercream, also with orange extract added (I think about 2 Tbsp, I just went by taste).
I split the frosting into two parts and coloured half orange using Wilton icing colour. To get the swirl effect, you add the frosting to the icing bag one spoonful at a time, alternating between colours and pressing the spoon to opposite sides of the bag as you go, so that you have an icing bag that is full of orange frosting on one side and white on the other. You get the best results by adding small spoonfuls, especially at the narrow end of the bag. As usual, I just used a Wilton 1M tip to make big swirls.

Luckily the recipe made three dozen because they've been disappearing fast!!

Cookies and Cream Cupcakes

Would you believe I don't actually post all the cupcakes I make on my blog? I made some peaches and cream ones on the weekend, and they only lasted for a couple of hours, so I made a new batch last night. I decided on a classic theme of cookies and cream.

The cupcakes are a plain vanila cake with about ten crushed oreos mixed into the batter at the end, just before putting it into the muffin cups. The frosting is a plain vanilla buttercream (since oreo cookie filling is vanilla) and there is half an oreo cookie tucked into the frosting on each one.

Chopping the cookies in half was a bit tricky. The best way I found was to use a sharp, heavy knife, lay it across the cookie and cut it very swiftly. I found that using a diagonal cut made the cookie break into three or four pieces, but holding the knife horizontally only broke a couple out of the dozen that I cut. And cutting too slowly flattens the cookie and makes the filling come out the sides.

I wanted to top them with big dollops of frosting, but I didn't have an icing tip large enough, so I just cut the end off of an icing bag and didn't use a tip at all. I like the way the shape came out, but it left little tiny stripes on the frosting where the seam in the bag was. Looks like I'll have to try and find some seamless bags for next time.

Simple! Delicious!

August 11th Cupcakes

I never get tired of making cupcakes! Today the theme was pina colada.

For the cupcakes, I used this recipe for pineapple cake, filling the cups about halfway and baking for 22 minutes instead of the longer time listed for a sheet cake. I also omitted the sauce that the recipe recommends because I prefer frosting and I thought having both would be overkill.

The cakes turned out wonderfully. My only wish is that the pineapple flavour was a bit stronger. I'm not sure how I could adapt the recipe to do that though since the pineapple is the only liquid in the recipe and I'm not aware of the existance of pineapple extract. I would love any suggestions.

The frosting is a coconut buttercream. I'm really pleased with how it turned out. Here is the recipe:

1/2 cup butter (salted, room temperature)
1/2 cup shortening
1/2 large bag of icing sugar (500g)
1 1/2 tsp coconut extract
3 Tbsp milk
1/2 cup shredded coconut

Beat butter and shortening on low until light and fluffy (about a minute). Add coconut extract and beat until combined. Add icing sugar about 3/4 cup at a time, beating until combined after each addition. Add milk, 1 Tbsp at a time, mixing until combined after each addition. You may need more or less milk to get a nice consistency. Add coconut and mix until combined.

I also toasted some more shredded coconut which I sprinkled on top of the frosted cupcakes. I did this by placing it in a frying pan and sauteeing over medium heat for a few minutes.

Both the cupcakes and the frosting turned out light and fluffy. The cupcakes are moist and the flavor of the frosting is amazing. They just keep getting better and better!

August 4th Bento Lunch

Messy bento!
I tried a couple of new things today. The first was an attempt to duplicate the gorgeous onigiri that Lyvvie from Obento Baby made back in May. To make the onigiri I first soaked 2 Tbsp of forbidden rice (black rice) for about an hour in order to pull out some of the colour so that it didn't completely overpower the white rice. I put it in the rice cooker with enough white rice to make 1 cup and then formed the onigiri as usual, using bonito flakes and soy sauce as a filling and sprinkling with white sesame seeds. I do like the way they turned out, but the colours didn't turn out as bright as Lyvvies!

The second new thing I tried was the rolled omelette in the top left corner. Instead of doing a rolled omelette in layers, this time I made one thick layer and then laid a sheet of nori on top (I need to get a tamagoyaki pan!!!). I then rolled the omelette using a sushi mat and sliced it to get the spiral pieces in the bento. I'm really pleased with how this turned out. Next time I might try using a larger pan and a thinner omelette to see how that looks. For some reason I absolutely love rolled foods in bento lunches. I always get really excited when I find or think of a new roll I can make.

For protein there are some leftover pork bites from last night's supper, covered with a few parsley leaves. For veggies there are asparagus, broccoli, sugar snaps, zuchinni slices and raw red pepper strips.

For fruit there are a couple of slices of yellow tomato, a few chunks of a fruit called a cactus pear (it actually comes from a cactus! The peel is spiny and can irritate your skin), a lychee and some berries. I included the last of the chocolate banana cupcakes for dessert.

Chocolate & Banana Cream Cupcakes

I made cupcakes last night. I listed off some choices for BF "Okay, so choice number one is matcha cupcakes with pomegranate frosting. Choice number 2 is vanilla cupcakes with banana cream filling and chocolate frosting,.."

He interrupted me "I don't need to hear anymore."

"But there are more choices"

"Nothing could be better than chocolate and banana."

Here they are:

I used the recipe for white cupcakes from Crazy About Cupcakes. This is the third time I've used it. I love the recipe, but these came out a little dry. I think I baked them about four minutes too long.

For the banana cream I used the recipe from this site, but I cut it in half (I still used two bananas though, effectively doubling the amount of banana in the recipe) and mashed the banana instead of cutting it so that it could be piped into the cupcakes (I use a Wilton's bismark tip #230 to do this). This is an excellent recipe, I highly recommend it.

The frosting is my regular buttercream with some cocoa and an additional tablespoon of milk added.

I decided to use yellow cupcake cups in keeping with the banana theme, and put slices of fresh banana on top (Do this immediately before serving because they turn brown and get soggy if you let them sit for more than a couple of hours).

These are some of the best cupcakes I've made yet!

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.

July 3rd Snack Bento + Cupcakes

Someone actually ordered cupcakes from me. I had a few leftover from a potluck last weekend so I ended up bringing them to a party afterwards. One of the guys there said he really liked my cupcakes and asked me to make him a dozen for his Friday morning meeting at work.

He didn't give me any instruction as to what he wanted "Oh, just whatever you're making would be great" so I made them the same as the ones last weekend, just with different decorations.

The cupcakes themselves are the "White Cupcakes" from book Crazy About Cupcakes. I substituted 1 3/4 cups of cake flour for the 1 1/2 cups white flour called for by the recipe and addded 1 1/2 cups of chopped mango. This is the second time I've used this recipe, and it's excellent.

They're filled with a pomegranate cream filling. I used the "Irish Cream Filling" recipe from the same book, and substituted pomegranate molasses (who knew this even existed?) for the Irish cream. I love this filling, it's amazingly creamy and tart.

The frosting is a plain buttercream and the stars are made from fondant. I was really pleased that I was able to match the frosting colours to the fondant so closely. This is the first time I was able to do that. It's actually quite a bit more purple than it looks in the picture.

I was so busy making cupcakes, I didn't really have time to make bento lunches, so it was a quick snack bento this morning.

There are three pork shu mai (I need to make another batch this weekend - almost out!), two little onigiris (buried), fried plantain hearts, asparagus, broccoli and sugar snaps, and the last of the black bean salad. The fruit is just strawberries, blueberries, raspberries and lychees.

Casino Birthday Cupcakes

Today is my mother's birthday. Happy Birthday Mom!

So of course, cupcakes were in order. Mom loves casino card games, so I went with a combination of winning blackjack hands and casino chips for decorations.

Here they are in my cupcake carrier earlier today, all ready for the trip to Mom's.
The cupcakes themselves are about as simple as it gets. I just made a marble fudge cake mix. I used enough of the batter to make a dozen cupcakes, and the rest I poured into a large loaf pan to make the center cake. I baked them separately since the cake took longer (about 4o minutes) and I didn't want to have to open the oven halfway through baking it to take the cupcakes out. In my experience, if you open the oven too soon when baking a cake, it doesn't raise properly.

The frosting is a plain buttercream. I used Wilton's delphinium blue to colour half of it. I love this colour! The poker chips are actually made of chocolate (purchased at a local candy store).

By far the most time consuming part were the fondant decorations. The letters in "Happy Birthday Mom" were quick enough to punch out of rolled fondant. I used a heart punch for both the hearts and spades. The cards were made by cutting rectangles out of white fondant and then rounding out the corners. The A's and K's took forever! My sister helped out though, so it went a bit faster.

All in all, I'm happy with the way that everything turned out. Mom really like it, and everything got eaten.

I have to say though that I found that I don't particularly enjoy cake decorating as much as cupcakes. I spent way too much time trying to get the icing smooth and doing the borders. So for my mom, I would go to the trouble of making a cake, but I think I will stick to wonderful, fabulous cupcakes for everything else.

June 24th Bento + Last Night's Cupcakes

Wow!! My blog has had 5000 hits!! That didn't take long at all!

I didn't have a plan this morning, but I think the bentos turned out pretty nice regardless and it was particularly tasty. I think I'm getting better at on-the-fly bento lunches.
I wasn't feeling like rice so I decided to boil up some soba noodles (they take two or three minutes). I already had dipping sauce for them in the fridge, so I just filled up a small container of sauce and tucked it in a silicone muffin cup, under the noodles. One of the tiny tomatoes is perched in the center of the noodles (it's smaller than a raspberry!). I really liked the way this sort of looked like a cupcake with a cherry on top (it's a little hard to tell from this angle, but the soba noodles were piled up, resembling frosting), so I put it in the top right of the bento where I usually put the dessert.

For protein there is a bacon wrapped chicken breast that BF baked up last night, cut into eight bite sized pieces, and the onigiri under it has ground chicken and hoisin sauce filling. There are a few cubes of cheddar cheese beneath the noodles as well.

For veggies, there are the standard asparagus, broccoli, sugar snaps and yellow zucchini slices as well as some steamed red swiss chard. This was the first time I tried red swiss chard, and it was yummy. Tastes a lot like beet greens.

For fruit there is half of a fig (I think these are so gorgeous!), raspberries, blueberries, blackberries and some locally grown strawberries (these were much more juicy and tasty than the ones we usually get, but they were more expensive). I also included two of these freaky little fruits called langsats. They look similar to lychees, but they divide naturally into wedges. I don't care a whole lot for the taste, but BF likes them. There is a truffle for dessert.

And here are some cupcakes I made last night by special request from BF. They were made from scratch (!!!) and were vanilla flavoured loaded with raspberries. The frosting was a plain buttercream and the letters and stars were made from fondant. I ran out of fondant decorations so I put candy coated chocolate sprinkles on a few of them.

Purple Lemon Cupcakes?

The idea this week was to make lemon meringue pie style cupcakes. The cupcakes themselves are lemon flavoured (I was lazy this week and used a mix), and then filled them with lemon curd to replicate pie filling.

I baked individual meringues using this recipe (minus the peppermint candy). They turned out like hard, melt in your mouth meringue cookies. They're really delicious, but next time I think I might try using soft meringues and a kitchen torch to brown them to make meringue more like what you find on an actual pie.

The frosting is a plain buttercream. I hadn't intended to colour it, but the meringues are so white that it didn't contrast enough. So purple was kind of a random choice but I think they turned out pretty and it matches the wrappers I used (Wilton makes them).


Definitely yummy cupcakes, but I think these ones are almost too sweet. Is that possible for a cupcake?

June 9th Bento

I found all kinds of new things at the grocery store this week, so I got to try some new foods in today's bento. And I learned a new way to cook - with banana leaves! They only had about six at the store. They're about two and a half feet long and about a foot wide, dark green and shiny. So today we had lemper!
Lemper is an Indonesian food that consists of coconut rice in banana leaves. Here's how I made it:

The night before, cook up some short grain white rice using two thirds coconut milk and one third water. Fried up some ground chicken with a pinch or two of curry powder and some chives, and when it's cooked, splash on a little lemon juice. Cut 5 inch squares of banana leaf and put 1 Tbsp rice in a rough sort of rectangle in the middle of the banana leaf and 1 Tbsp of the chicken mixture on top of that. Fold up the sides and tie with a small strip of banana leaf, and they're ready to go in the fridge. In the morning when making the bento, steam the lemper packets for 15 minutes (this is the longest time I've ever spent cooking anything for a bento by a long shot, but it was so worth it), remove from the steamer and let them cool for a bit before placing them in the bento. I stacked up two in mine.

This was without a doubt the best rice I've ever had in a bento. It was so moist and flavorful, just heavenly. And making them was fun. There's something about wrapping rice in leaves that feels really simple and wholesome. I have more banana leaf cooked foods planned for this week (we went back today and bought two more), so stay tuned!

Because of the small amount of rice, I packed in a whole bunch of sweet potato flowers (boiled with a little butter and cinnamon on them) for additional carbs. And because of the small amount of chicken, I packed two of the mini quiches BF made yesterday, and a couple of bites of cheddar for additional protein. There was some empty space so I threw in a couple leek dumplings.

For vegetables we have the usual broccoli, asparagus, sugar snaps and yellow zucchini. I found some new fruits though! In the bottom corner there is a fresh lychee. I had never tried these before. They have delicious flavour with a bizarre juicy-membrane like consistency. Sorry, that's best way I can think to describe it. Appetizing, right?

There are a couple of cherries next to that (they're down to $4.99 a pound so I've been eating a lot of these), and above that there red and white raspberries. I didn't even know white raspberries existed. Turns out they taste just like red ones, but I like the colour that they add to the bento. There are some blueberries and strawberries, and to finish it off, a cupcake from the batch this weekend.

Here's a diagonal shot too because I liked how the banana leaf looked in this one:

Lilypad Cupcakes

Sorry about the lack of bento yesterday. I realized when I was halfway to work yesterday that I forgot to take a picture of it

Another Saturday, another batch of cupcakes...
I made chocolate cupcakes filled with a pomegranate vanilla cream (very tart!). The purple ones have a plain buttercream frosting and the green ones have matcha green tea buttercream frosting (I looooove matcha frosting).

My sister helped me make the decorations. There are lilypads, water lilies and hearts made from green and purple fondant, and some gummy frogs on the lilypads.

The water lilies didn't turn out quite the way I wanted, but I'm still pretty new at fondant decorations, so this was one of the most complex things I've tried yet. I think they turned out to be pretty flowers, but they don't exactly look like water lilies. I'll keep trying!!

As always, you can click on the picture to get a closer look.

June 2nd Bento

Last night, I ate the best steak of my life. BF cooked it on the barbecue and it was so juicy and perfect. And it was huge! Big enough to feed the two of us and still have more than enough left over for bento. I ended up making it into rice paper rolls.
To make the steak rolls, I cut the steak into strips, cut some lettuce strips, julienned some carrot and grated a little cheddar cheese and then followed the same method as in my turkey roll recipe. They were so delicious!

Below the steak rolls I managed to squeeze in a few pieces of asparagus. On the left there is broccoli, sugar snaps, some steamed miso spinach, yellow zucchini, red pepper strips, a red bean onigiri and a boiled quail egg.

On the right there is the last mini cupcake from the batch I made on the weekend, a whole lot of berries (they were really cheap this weekend so I bought a ton - strawberries, blueberries, cherries, raspberries and blackberries), a few bites of fresh pineapple and half of a sliced apricot.

One of the things I love most about bento is that if you want to have unhealthy food (like steak and cupcakes!), it's really easy to build a healthy lunch around that and still indulge yourself. The tiny, controlled portions mean that you can enjoy a few treats without the mindless eating and overindulgence that comes with large portion sizes.

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.

Cupcakes!

Since I started making bento, I've amassed quite the collection of cookie cutters and ham & cheese cutters. I found another fun use for them...cupcake decorations!

On Saturday mornings I like to clean my kitchen from top to bottom, and since I'm there anyway it's a great time to bake something, so these are this morning's cupcakes.

The theme was (obviously) tigers.

The cupcakes are a basic vanilla that I filled with chocolate hazelnut fudge.

The icing is buttercream, and the tigers and stars were punched from rolled fondant. It actually didn't take much thought to put the tiger faces together, because I've made so many faces on onigiri.

It's a little hard to tell from the picture but I used orange for the face, yellow for the area around the mouth and pink triangles for the ears and nose.

Cute and delicious! My favorite kind of food!

May 19th Bento

I didn't intend for today's bento to turn out so cutesy...it just kind of happened!

I found some mini sweet potato pies in the freezer from a batch I made a few weeks ago, so I thought they would be nice in today's bento. I decorated this one with mozzarella and cheddar flowers.

The onigiris are from last week's frozen batch. The bunny is plain, the tiger was coloured with tumeric and rice vinegar, and the elephant was coloured with purple yam powder and rice vinegar. Accents are nori and ham. There's also a heart shaped onigiri made with coconut rice and a nori accent. It was nice to have so many different onigiris because it adds some different flavours to the bento.

Underneath the onigiris are slices of a stuffed pork loin. The onigiris are really short, so they need to sit on something to elevate them, and that allows me to fit even more types of food into the bento!

In the bottom left corner there is some steamed spinach with miso and ground sesame seeds. Other veggies include yellow and green zucchini, fiddleheads and broccoli space fillers (all steamed).

There wasn't much room left for fruit so we have some blueberries, strawberries and blackberries.

Yesterday I made cupcakes, and I ended up having some leftover batter, so I made a batch of mini cupcakes as well that turned out small enough for a bento box! It's a chocolate cupcake with red bean filling. The frosting is buttercream with some matcha green tea powder, and the cupcake is topped with a small ball of mochi. It was sooo decadent! I put the cupcake in a foil muffin cup in addition to the muffin cup it was baked in, so that none of the moisture from the fruit soaked into it.