Fancy Some Tea?

Last year, my boyfriend introduced me to chai lattes. Since then, chai and I have a very good relationship. When looking in my favorite cupcake recipe book, Primrose Bakery, I read the Earl Grey recipe. There was a blurb about substituting your favorite tea instead of Earl Grey...now you know what that meant- Chai cupcakes with a chai buttercream. I only had five chai tea bags left so I used four for the cake recipe and only one for the buttercream. I was very proud of myself after tasting the frosting. I made it completely on my own, just throwing stuff into the good old kitchen aid mixer. Even now I couldn't tell you exact measurements. I didn't think the one tea bag infusing the milk I had set aside would be enough flavor for the butercream so I also added the spices I found laying around that make up chai: nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, ginger. The only thing I didn't have was cardamom, but it still tasted wonderful. A nice lightly sweet cupcake. Take a look!

 

 

Cafe Mocha

These last two weeks have been pretty dreadful. Between saying goodbyes to almost all my friends as they head off to "the time of their lives", long shifts at work, and motivating myself to pack-let's just say it's been messy. Luckily one of my best friend's sisters, Colleen, gave me something to do that lets me have some time to myself. Yes, it's baking. Colleen wanted snickerdoodle and something else. I'm glad she ordered two kinds, because she let me surprise her. I have a list of cupcakes I've been dying to make and these were it. Mocha cupcakes (courtesy of Mybakingaddiction). The cake was perfect texture, and the frosting really made the coffee flavoring stronger. They may not have the amount of caffeine in a regular cup of coffee, but these will surely wake you up!

 

 

This is how I get my friends to come over

 

I offer them cupcakes. Meet my beautiful friend Sam. She tasted both the key lime and coconut cupcakes. I forgot to ask her which kind was her favorite. 

Then I decided I should probably have one. After all, I spent time and money making them, right? 

 

Mmm. I've resorted to eating cupcakes with forks now due to the fact that sometimes the frosting is so high that I can't bite into it

Eying my prey, & going in for another bite or two...

GONE.

A Passion for Passion Fruit

One of my favorite fruits, is passion fruit. I love how tropical the flavor is. I finally had some fresh ones in Jamaica this past June. They were more tart than I had imagined but still very tasty.
So when I made coconut cupcakes recently, I figured what better to pair with this tropical flavor than passion fruit? Of course, there are no passion fruit in supermarkets up here in New England, so I settled for passion fruit concentrate and made a buttercream with it. The coconut cupcakes were a recipe from Martha's cupcake book. I scored this on sale at Homegoods a couple weeks ago.

 

And here they are:

 

Mmm. Takes me back to Jamaica.

A Refreshing Flavor for Summer

I know, I know, I know. I haven't posted in what seems like years. It's not that I haven't been baking, of course not. The kitchen is covered in confectioner's sugar nearly every week. But I like to take pictures of the newest additions to my recipe binder. When I have orders for the usual (peanut butter cup, red velvet, vanilla, lemon, etc.) orders it's boring for me to photograph them each time, and especially tedious if I'm pressed for time.
What's exciting though, is I had my largest order a couple weeks ago. It was for a wedding shower. 5 dozen cupcakes! Can ya believe it? I know, I've got nothin' on the 1000 you have to make on Food Network's "Cupcake Wars" but I'm getting there! This order was 2 dozen red velvet, 2 dozen raspberry lemon, and 1 dozen vanilla bean/blackberry. They looked very pretty, if I do say so myself!

My brother's birthday was this past weekend and for months he'd been saying that he wanted his birthday present to be key lime cupcakes. Well, I got him an actual present, and today I finally made him his choice dessert, in cupcake form!
I got the recipe from Cupcake Project. It's nontraditional in the sense that it's a key lime cake with a graham cracker cream cheese frosting, instead of the other way around. It was today that I discovered yet another favorite recipe! This frosting was so good. I'm definitely more of a cream cheese frosting kinda girl, cuts back the sweetness of the powdered sugar. And the cake was light and fluffy and perfectly tart. Check 'em out!
(They're not as pretty as usual because the graham cracker crumbs in the frosting weren't fine enough to allow me to use my usual 1M pastry tip.)

A fun fact about key limes is that they are filled with seeds that will produce two trees for every one seed.

Another fun fact is that they came over with good ol' Chris Columbus, because the citrus in the fruit prevented scurvy.

 

 

 

 Upon biting into the very first one, my brother's first words were, "Wow, these ARE good." As if he should have doubted me?! Anyway, we agreed they are a fair representation of the ever popular pie.

Velvet-y smooth

Ah, red velvet cupcakes. I knew I'd make them eventually. My neighbor ordered a dozen for their annual soccer memorial day weekend party, along with a dozen s'mores and a dozen chocolate chip cookie dough. It was a busy week, needless to say.

 This time I tried taking some pictures outside. The weather's been wonderful, so why not? Now I just need some nicer-looking plates in the future. 

Combining my two favorite things:

Baking and Photography

Source 

Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Cupcakes

These were really fun to make. My cousins sent me the recipe from here. The cake was pretty dense, more like the consistency of a muffin, delicious nonetheless. My Mom suggested trying it with banana cream cheese frosting next time and it is now on my To-Bake list!

And I got a new cupcake stand! It makes its debut appearance in one of these pictures. Thank you Homegoods.

From this:

To this:

Then fill it with the yummy filling

 

And frost!

Raspberry Cupcakes with Lemon Cream Cheese Frosting

I cannot wait until Summer for many reasons. One of them is that July is raspberry picking season! I have not met a fruit I didn't like, and raspberries rank very high in my favorites. I liked adding fruit to the cupcakes. It made me feel like this recipe was a bit healthier...though probably not!

I used the cake recipe from this book that was a gift from my Grandma. Primrose Bakery is all the way in London, so I won't be trying their cupcakes anytime soon. I still haven't perfected their unique way of frosting the cupcakes as shown in the top center picture, but I am trying.

 

beauteous.

Happy Easter!

Yay for Easter! My favorite thing about this holiday is one of its mascots, bunnies! I wonder how the Easter bunny came to be associated with this wondrous holiday.

Isn't he adorable? I want one, but my Mom doesn't want to have to take care of it next year when I'm off at school. Oh well, someday.

My Easter weekend has been filled with cupcakes! I made two dozen for Emily for Saturday, a dozen for Caroline for today, a dozen for my own family, and I assembled a mixed bag dozen for Dylan's family. I've been very pleased with how they all turned out, though my feet hurt from prancing around in the kitchen these last two nights and mornings. All very worth it, however. It always is.

Take a look at the lemon curd-filled cupcakes I made for Caroline and her family: