Josh loves German Chocolate cake. It is one of his favorites and he often has it on his birthday. I decided I would make this for his birthday this year and then thought – why not try cupcakes. I had seen these in my Martha Stewart Cupcake book, but decided to use the recipe that Josh likes from the Baker’s German Chocolate, but instead of a three-layer cake make cupcakes instead. Making cupcakes also meant that I could make some with coconut and pecans and some without since I am not a big fan of either of these, but Josh really likes the coconut. Since the icing wasn’t very thick without the coconut and pecans I decided to add some mini chocolate chips after the icing cooled. The chocolate chips melted a little, but helped to make the icing a bit more chunky so when I put it on the layers it didn’t just side right off. I think I should have made a few more coconut ones though since Josh liked those!

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.

Okay…this is not a post about anything I made, but being a math person and all I thought I would post about this picture. It has to do with math and cupcakes, so… I figured it was appropriate :-) My friend, another math ed PhD student at MSU, sent me this. His brother took this picture of the giant cupcake box at a Menard’s. So, if a Giant 3-D Cupcake is a huge hit every time, what about other cupcakes? My friend asks the question, does this company also make planar, linear, or hyperspace cupcakes? I wonder……

I thought I would try two new things – a new cake (yes – cake, not cupcake) experiment and a new Blog experiment. First, I hope the Blog experiment works. I created a slide show of pictures from my Cake Tatoo Experiment. You should see this above – I hope. The Cake Tatoo Experiment was something I thought I would try for a cake I was bringing to a friends house for a BBQ. It was not a success, but also not a total disaster. I used Duff’s Cake Tattoo. Duff is the cake designer from Charm City Cakes that is featured on the Food Network show Ace of Cakes. I am bummed that I can’t watch this show. We don’t have cable (we just get over the air stations) and they don’t air this on hulu. I also can’t find the DVDs on Netflix. Oh well! Anyway, the Cake Tattoo is a thin piece of edible art that you place on an iced cake. I am a bit miffed because in this video (If you are interested I think you’ll have to click on the Watch Video link and scroll down to view the Graffiti and Killer Cake Bling video) Duff said it will totally look awesome. Not so much, but I won’t hold it agaisnt him. I mean, if he did it, it probably would look totally awesome! Anyway, when I did mine my base cake was too small and so the cake tatoo wouldn’t exactly fit. So, I had to cut the bottom a little. Also, I could not get the seams right. You can see that in the pictures. I was happier with the upper tier. It didn’t look too bad. I then used blue icing with a decorator tip to add some extra pizazz! I was a little too embarrassed to bring this to the BBQ because Josh said it looked like he was eating paper. It may have looked a little wonky, but it tasted okay (for days….). Maybe I’ll have to just try Duff’s Cake Graffiti products. Maybe spraying designs would be easier… Stay on the lookout for that at some point (maybe).

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!

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.

I am so behind in posting my cupcakes. I have made quite a few since the last post, but have been busy doing lots of other things… like officially passing comps, working and trying to put together my dissertation proposal. I do have my priorities straight! Rather then posting all of my back-logged cupcakes today I will try to space them out a bit.

Here is a cupcake I made a few months ago for a meeting I was having with someone who happened to have a birthday that day. I really liked the chocolate icing I made for the Chocolate Salted Caramel Cupcakes. So, I decided to use that icing, but add some mint to it in the form of mint extract and some crushed thin mint cookies. Yummy!