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!

I Scream… You Scream… We All Scream for Ice Cream!

No, these are not real ice cream cones, much to the dismay of some of the little ones who were at the party I took these to. :-) I made these for an end-of-the-summer party we had for one of my research projects. I couldn’t resist posting two pictures of these. These are cupcakes that just so happen to look like soft-serve vanilla ice cream cones. They were really fun to make. I got the recipe from here. The ice cream is meringue that was piped onto a cookie sheet and baked for 1.5 hours at 200 degrees. I sprinkled some sprinkles on some of them before baking – it was so easy – the sprinkles stuck to the meringue and didn’t burn or melt while cooking. I covered a 13 in. x 9 in. pan with foil and poked some holes in the foil. I then placed an ice cream cone in each hole. This helped keep the cones up straight and I think it helped the cake not get too mushy. The ice cream cones are filled with yellow cake and chocolate fudge pudding and were baked at 350 degrees. I then just took a little buttercream icing and used it to attach the meringue to the cone. I was amazed at how much they looked like ice cream cones. Personally, I liked the look more than the taste, but they seemed to go over pretty well at the party.