An apple a day...

Wow! I am so far behind in posting! It has been a busy semester observing student teachers and working on my dissertation proposal. So, I haven't been making cupcakes that much, but you'll see a few posts in the next few weeks - some of which are me just catching up and some because it is the holidays and I've taken to making more sweets! :-)

So, way back in October a friend of mine bought me the What's New, Cupcake? book. For you cupcakers out there this is by the authors of the Hello, Cupcake book. You can check out their blog here. Anyway, how nice was that to get this book! Yay! Right away I started flipping through the book trying to decide what to make. My birthday was coming up soon and I thought that I might try to make the apple cupcakes. They seemed interesting and I thought they were a good fit considering the whole teacher/apple tradition.

I thought they were pretty good. I followed the recipe in the book to doctor up a yellow cake mix. I added an extra egg and used buttermilk rather than water.

This is supposed to make the cake a bit denser and I think it did. I happened to have some red cupcake liners left over from Fourth of July. Perfect! I used my usual cream cheese icing and colored it red. I put a thin layer of frosting directly on the cupcake and then the interesting part about these was that that on top there is a mini chocolate frosted donut. You cut the donut so that it lays flat on the cupcake and then put it in the freezer for a bit so that it firms up. After a little bit I took them out and put more frosting on the top trying to get the frosting to go on so that it looked like an apple. Then I just dipped the cupcake in some red sugar. For the stem I used half a tootsie roll and I cut little leaves out of starburst candies. It did actually look like an apple although it tasted like a cupcake!

Birthday Cake Gone Bad... Cupcakes to the Rescue

Okay, so it was my friend Aaron's birthday this past weekend. I had these grand plans to re-create something I found on the Charm City Cakes website (this is the "Ace of Cakes" bakery). Who was I kidding! I spend a week trying to figure out how I was going to re-create the TI-84 Graphing Calculator Cake you see below. I had some of it figured out - I even did some math to do this. I used my scanner to scan in my own graphing calculator. I then enlarged the image so that it was about the size of a 9 x 13 in. cake. I was then able to print it and use it as a template for cutting out my fondant pieces. That all worked out fine, but when it came to being able to write on all the little fondant pieces the only success I had was the white keys. For these I was able to use my black food writer. However, most of the keys are gray or black and I was not able to find a good way to write such small text on these keys since none of my food writers would work. Then came trying to get the right color gray fondant and being able to use this to cover the 9 x 13 in cake. I got the fondant to be on okay gray color, but man of man, did it look pretty bad when I put it all on the actual cake. Believe me - nobody would have wanted to eat it! :-) Sorry, no pictures! So, I decided I just couldn't do this. All hail Ace of Cakes! You are amazing! How cool is this cake?!?! So, I decided that since I agreed to make the cake that I would quickly swap out the calculator cake with some birthday cupcakes instead. These are my usual chocolate cupcakes with cream cheese icing. I decided to do something different than my usual star tip for the icing. I piped these on without a tip to create little mounds of icing. I then used my Wilton Alphabet and Number Fondant Cutters to cut out the letters and numbers for "Happy 31st Birthday Aaron!" These were a little rushed, but in the end I think they were cute and people thought they were tasty. So, that is a plus! Here's one more picture - a close up. From now on, I think I'll stick to cupcakes, or at least simple cakes for now! :-)

Fourth of July Cupcakes by Lorraine & Patrick!

Whew! I am almost caught up! I made these cupcakes in July (of this year!). These Fourth of July cupcakes happen to be one of my favorite batches because my nephew Patrick helped me decorate them. My family (mom, dad, brother, sister-in-law, nephew, and niece) came to visit for a few days. I asked Patrick on Friday if he wanted to help me make the cupcakes on Sunday. Periodically throughout the day on Friday and Saturday Patrick kept reminding the family that we were making these. He would say, "Guess what?" We'd reply "What?" He would then say "On Sunday we're making cupcakes!" We decorated these with red and blue fondant stars and red, white, and blue sprinkles. Cream-cheese icing of course. The two without icing were Patrick's since he doesn't like cheese. It was so much fun to make these!

Let's Talk About Math!

Here I unveil my new cupcake display. I had been wanting to get one of these, but just never really had the reason. Since I decided I would make these cupcakes for an important meeting we were having I figured now was the time to buy one of these. So, you are probably wondering what in the heck these are. It's no surprise that I decided to make these with chocolate cake and cream cheese icing (I know, I need to start branching out more), but what are those funny things on the cupcakes you ask. Well, they are talk or thought bubbles to represent each of the five talk moves for having a productive mathematics discussion - Wait Time, Revoicing, Restating, Prompting, and Applying. For more about these "tasty" moves you should check out the book by Chapin, O'Connor, and Anderson where these moves originated. You can find it on Amazon. The book was written with elementary math classes in mind, but one of the projects I worked on this year was in the process of developing PD materials for middle and high school teachers centered around these moves. I also discussed these moves in my secondary methods course (so some of you might remember them!) The bubbles are made out of Wilton fondant and I used my new gourmet food markers made by TCP Global (who actually makes paint for cars - go figure!) I love the new markers. They are great! So much better than the marker I used for the iterated cupcakes. It was so easy to write on the fondant. Anyway, these were not only pretty tasty, but where great discussion pieces and since these moves are all about discussion - it was perfect!

Happy Birthday FMBH!

Here's another long overdue pic of some cupcakes I made for some colleagues who had birthdays in March. You guessed it (well, maybe you did) - their names began with F, M, B, and H. I originally tried to use my letter cookie cutters to cut the letters out of the sugar cookies, but that didn't work very well :-( The dough just expanded and you could not see the letter anymore. So, I decided to just bake the cookies as I normally would and use the cookie cutters to create little fondant monograms that I could put right on the cookie. These are chocolate cupcakes (of course!) iced with my favorite cream cheese icing.

Iterated Cupcakes

Here was my first attempt at trying to use fondant. I made these for my advisors birthday. He is the PI of a project I work on involving measurement in elementary curricula, hence the rulers!

I made two different kinds - chocolate and spice cake and even made my own cream cheese icing!