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.