PhDCupcaker

Lately I have had a few cupcakes that have been a long time in the making. This is one of those as well… Not sure if you can read the text on the picture above, but it reads “Happy Birthday Aaron!” My friend Aaron had found this recipe for Mountain Dew Cupcakes from All Things Cupcake and asked me about 7 months ago if I would make these for his birthday in May. Of course I said I would and I made sure to add it to my Google Calendar! Since Aaron already knew these cupcakes were coming I decided to add a little something extra. I had been wanting to try to make royal icing transfers because I saw these really cute ones on Sweetopia. Here they are. I thought about just making big letters for Aaron’s name just like these, but then I thought that I might combine Aaron’s love of Mountain Dew with his love of   Disney (hence the Disney wrappers) and create the letters to display the phrase  “Happy Birthday Aaron!” in Disney font since he is such a lover of all things Disney… Hey Aaron – you should start that blog “All Things Disney”, after finishing grad school that is :-) I just checked and allthingsdisney.com is taken, but I’m sure you could come up with a clever Disney blog name. Anyway, back to the cupcakes… since these were Mountain Dew cupcakes and the icing was going to be a neon green color and the cupcakes were lemon-limey I thought I would make the letters with a yellow royal icing and add a little lemon extract. I downloaded a Disney font and got transferring. It was actually not too hard, but a little time consuming. I did two of each letter in the phrase just in case one of them broke. The post I mentioned before of the that got me interested in this explains exactly how to do the transfer. I already had some transparencies laying around! We are teachers after all – they were left over from the days before computers and projectors!  It retrospect, a wider font might have worked better, but I was afraid if I made these too large they wouldn’t sit upright on the cupcakes. I think when I brought them in I actually ended up laying the letters flat on the cupcake because they wouldn’t fit in my Martha Stewart cupcake carrier if they were standing upright. I am not a Mountain Dew drinker, but I must say I was pretty impressed by these cupcakes.They had a really nice lemon-lime flavor and were pretty dense and also really moist. Here is a picture of Aaron enjoying the cupcakes. Unfortunately it was taken with my phone and I tried to zoom in for some reason and so it is pretty blurry. Also, I thought you might want to hear what he had to say about these cupcakes. So, you can check out his blog post here.  Thanks Aaron for asking me to make these! It was a ton of fun!