Archive for December, 2010
December 31st, 2010
Ahh….. truffles. When I went to New York City for my friend’s wedding we decided to make truffles. She had taken a truffle making class and so knew all the ins and outs of truffle-making! As you can see from this first picture it was a bit of a mess! See that brown mark on the cabinet?  Yep – that is chocolate! We made the inside of the truffles the night before and had them chilling in the fridge. The next day we covered them in tempered chocolate by dropping them in this bowl you see at the left. I was then in charge of covering them. We did some toffee ones, some sugar/salt ones – those are the ones with the bluish color, and some powdered sugar ones. The salt ones were way too salty and the powdered sugar ones just didn’t really stay in ball-form. We loved the toffee ones though. They were good! The plan was to bring these to the rehearsal dinner, but then we forgot them. Oh well, I know that people were enjoying them here and there and they were definitely fun to make!   
December 31st, 2010
I am still catching up on posts and as you can see,  have done a lot of re-designing of the blog (including moving it to our website). It has kept me quite occupied for a while! Anyway, a few months ago I posted the Ice Cream Cake Cupcakes I made that looked like real ice cream cones. They were fun to make and looked cool, but were still more cake than ice cream. These, however were REAL ice cream cake cupcakes! I am a big fan of ice cream cake and so I decided to check out Cold Stone Creamery’s Website since there is one in Downtown East Lansing. I found that they had ice cream cake cupcakes! So, for my birthday we decided to get these. I was worried that they would be pretty expensive, but they weren’t too  bad… too bad it was so long ago that I don’t remember the cost. They come in a package of 6 which was perfect because there were two of each kind (Sweet Cream, Cake Batter Delux, and Double Chocolate Devotion) – one for me and one for Josh, They were all really good. I totally recommend them!
December 31st, 2010
Happy New Year from PhDcupcaker! Doesn’t that look like me (even just a little)? I tried my best! We have had a website for a while, but haven’t been good about updating it – I guess that is one of our New Year’s resolutions! Since I got into blogging my cupcakes and other treats last year I thought it might be better to house my blog on our site. So, from now on you will find PhDcupcaker here at http://themalesfamily.com/phdcupcaker. I am going to try to be better about blogging. I hope you like the new design! I found a really great template by Gisele Jaquenod. You can find more of her free templates here. I then adapted it,  including adding my own images and menus. I hope you like it! The menu on the left side will allow you to go easily to the archives for different treats and sweet related posts. Not all of the buttons are operational yet because I am still behind in posts!
For those of you that followed my blogspot blog I’d love for you to follow this one. I won’t be posting on that one anymore. For those of you new to my blog please become a follower! Just click on the join my site button on the right.
December 11th, 2010
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!
