mini babycakes!!!!!

My cousin Lindsay is having a baby! I think about two weeks ago was her baby shower and no one asked me but I showed up with cupcakes anyway. ;o)


I've had this recipe for rainbow cupcakes bookmarked for awhile and used it as my inspiration. Great blog, but uses metric measurements. :op

So I figured I'd find a nice white cake recipe to use. The first batch actually came out way over baked and dry since I kept waiting for the cake to "spring back when touched." That never happened...so I just took em out when they looked baked to me which was more like 10-12 min.

This made a lot of mini cupcakes! Three pans of 24 worth actually...something to keep in mind.


Oh...so they don't want to know whether they're having a boy or girl, so I thought baby pink and blue cupcakes would be darling. :o) It turned out fun because as people came up to the tray they chose a pink or blue depending on what they're routing for. Anyway, I was really excited to color the batter, not sure why but food coloring is always cool.


I played with layering the batter to make cupcakes that were pink and white, blue with white, blue/pink, all 3 colors, it was a free for all. With my first pan that turned out dry, I also found it's easy to over fill the cups with this layering deal, so think 2/3 full and if you fill too much they'll still come out good. :o) There's more photos of this stage here.


Poor lighting, but here's how I packed them off to the shower. I made both vanilla and chocolate buttercream to frost them with. My piping got a little sloppy, but I was headed down the shore once I was finished, if that's any excuse. ;o)


And here's how they turned out! More babycake mini photos here!

Cupcake Inspiration

Bon jour! I'm in Quebec for work. Thought I'd post some cupcake picture inspiration from some Flickr pages I've been bookmarking lately.

I rather like my own Flickr site these days too, I'm compiling lots of cute stuff on it. ;op


Hydrangea Cupcakes from Glorious Treats.


Pink and Gold Wedding Cupcakes by Sweet cupcakes Co. Dublin Ireland.


Burgers Pickles and Cheese Cupcakes by pearls cupcake shoppe.


Something Blue Cupcake by cupcakes ever after.

Btw, blogger...what the hell is your problem with uploading photos? Only worked if I opened an empty post and uploaded before I typed any text? ggrrr...

pink lemonade love

omg...july is nearly here and gone already... I made these the Friday of 4th of July weekend from this recipe from Grin and Bake It.

After my pina colada cupcake disappointment I have to say I was a little skeptical about flavored cupcakes other than things like vanilla or chocolate. :op But the pink lemonade concentrate did the trick and they did bake up to taste rather pink lemonade-y.

But, I baked them too long sadly. I am learning to back off the bake time a lot for these minis. 15-18 or less even should do it. Also 10 is a weird yield for a cupcake recipe it seems. This recipe made 24 minis for me easy, and I probably could of filled the cups a bit more than I did.

And when it came time to frost, I had like 12 times what I needed! Will definitely half the frosting recipe next time!

Here is the pink lemonade mini cupcake story in pictures.


Used my food coloring from my nifty Wilton cake decorating set to dye the batter pink. I could of used more I think, but I'm a little afraid of it still. FYI, these are not filled enough, should of topped them off.


All baked up! Not nearly pink enough but I love how puffed up the tops on these get. Imagine if I filled the cups enough?! So cute, I die.


NOM!!!!!!!! Barely-pink cake. A little dry but no one is perfect.


Off to pre-4th of July bbq. I had bought yellow decorating sugar especially for these to sprinkle on them but Dave started texting me to get up there earlier than I had planned because of holiday weekend traffic and I was in such a rush I forgot! Save it for something else I guess, I was disappointed though. Btw, I made it there in an hour as usual. ;o)

More in my baking adventures set!

pina colada cupcakes!

About a week ago I had a birthday picnic/bbq to go to, and since you always have to bring something to these events, i thought i'd bake something boozey. I had this pina colada cupcake recipe I'd been wanting to try out so I decided to make those.

Overall, I didn't find much pina colada about these pina colada cupcakes.

The recipe calls for cake flour and usually I just look up how I can substitute all purpose flour, but I had to go to the supermarket anyway for the crushed pineapple and figured I'd look. I found pastry flour...but it was whole wheat...but figured it would be a good idea to follow the recipe as closely as possible, so i got the whole wheat pastry flour.

As I'm whipping up my cupcakes with my whole wheat pastry flour and it just looks weird! It tasted okay but I was skeptical.


I used free-standing foil cupcake cups since I had so much batter. Here is the whole wheat pastry flour cupcake before it was baked. I can't say I thought it was that appetizing but I pressed on seeing how they'd bake up.

Also the recipe calls for only a 1/3 cup of well drained crushed pineapple. After seeing how much batter this yielded I had serious doubts about their pineappleness, in the end I was right.


Here they are all baked up! The whole wheat flour made their coloring a bit off from usual cupcakes, but they were nice and spongey and tasty none the less! There is definitely a whole wheat texture to them, different, but good!

So on to the frosting. I do not own a candy thermometer and things like "when syrup reaches firm ball stage" are just too complicated for me, I have to knowledge of such stages so how would i recognize them anyway? :op I googled this recipe for vanilla spiced rum frosting.

I liked how it came out very much! although I did leave out the vanilla and double the rum in hopes of saving the pina colada-ness of it. Didn't really work and I can't say the flavor of the spiced rum really came out either, but it was good either way! I should of doubled it or even double plus half to frost all of these though if I wanted to pipe them all. I thought of garnishing with some shredded coconut to salvage the pina coladaness, but I didn't have any and had already put in a lot of effort with these cupcakes! I wasn't going to the store again. :op


I broke out my sweet cake decorating set to pipe the frosting. More fun with piping frosting is on my flickr page.


This is the plate I saved for myself. They went over really well at the party though! More of the cupcakes ready to travel on flickr again.


I wanted to bring some to my parents so I made some virgin pina colada cupcakes where I just threw some crushed pineapple in the frosting, but again, you couldn't really taste it. I needed to get more mileage out of the frosting towards the end so I iced these with a knife. And colored it blue so I'd remember which were the virgin ones, haha.

So overall, I was mad I did all that work and in the end I had no pina colada cupcakes. Although they did turn out yummy and everyone was impressed! I will have to continue searching for a pina colada cupcake that tastes like pina colada. Open to suggestions!