So, if you are looking at this cupcake saying… That looks just like the Hostess cupcakes I used to eat as a kid – Great! That was the idea! There is this cupcake place that I have talked about before in Toledo called Cake in a Cup. They have some great cupcakes. Check out their menu here.  I couldn’t tell you which one is my favorite because they are all so good. One of my uncles though does have a favorite – he is obsessed with their Hostess with the Mostest – yes Rob, I am talking about you :-) When they came to visit this winter I talked about trying to make my own version. At the end of May when I wanted to make some cupcakes for a friend’s birthday and for Josh’s Calculus class (who I promised I would make cupcakes for again because they loved those e^xcellent cupcakes so much) I decided I would make some Red Velvet ones (since those are one of her favorites) and I would attempt to make my own Hostess with the Mostest. If you couldn’t tell by the name – this cupcake is basically a much tastier version of the good old Hostess CupCake. Using what I knew about the Cake in a Cup version I made a a somewhat dense chocolate cupcake, a creaming/icing-like filling (using marshmallow cream), some tasty chocolate ganache, and a little icing for piping on those Hostess swirls. Here they are filled before I put the ganache on top.  I had enough filling that I ended up going back through and adding more filling to each one. Then, it was time for the ganche. I love this picture of me adding the ganache because if you look closely you can see how much of a cupcake fan I am – not only am I icing these cupcakes I am also wearing my one (of two) cupcake aprons (this was a present from myfriends Aaron and Megan – thanks!) and I am also wearing a cupcake shirt that I purchased at Johhny Cupcakes with my Uncle David in Boston. He told us we were going to a cupcake shop on Newbury St. – little did we know they don’t actually sell cupcakes, but they sell cupcake apparel and accessories. I must admit it was pretty cool. Check out the story behind the store here.  I found the perfect cupcake shirt. You can’t see the shirt since it is covered by the apron, but here is a snapshot – it was the perfect  mix of cupcakes and teacher supplies! The cupcake is lined paper and you’ve got your pencil and sharpener – it was perfect (and on sale)! Anyway, once the ganache was on I put these in the fridge for a while to let it harden a bit. It didn’t come out as smooth as I wanted, but it wasn’t too bad. Then it was time to put the iconic icing swirl on top. It took me a while to get the right consistency and get the swirl to look good. As you can see… some came out better than others. Did you notice that they are not all swirls? Since I was giving these to Josh to bring to his Calculus students I wrote Calculus on a a few of them, but man Calculus is a rather long word to try to spell out on a cupcake, so there were only a few of those. I also wrote my friend’s name on one. I actually mailed four cupcakes to NYC for her. She said they arrived okay so I guess I didn’t do too bad of a wrapping job. Unfortunately Rob was in Japan and so he didn’t get to sample one of these. He reminded me though that they do have FedEx in Japan too… Note sure they would have made it!

So, one of the blogs I have been following, Karen’s Cookies, Cakes, and More had a post the other day about something called Club:BAKED. For those of you that follow cooking blogs you have probably run into bloggers that are part of these baking clubs… I have been participating in the Martha Stewart Cupcake Club for a while now. Basically, everyone has the same cookbook, someone picks a recipe, and everyone bakes and posts about it on a particular day. Club: BAKED is all about baking through the book Baked Explorations: Classic American Desserts Reinvented by  Matt Lewis & Renato Poliafito. They are the owners of Baked NYC, which by the way was voted best cupcake shop in NYC by Serious Eats! I seriously need to check that out the next time I am in NYC. So, anyway, back to Club: BAKED – I will be baking along with the other club members twice a month. I know what you are thinking… don’t you have a dissertation to be writing? Yes – I do, but I figured I would probably bake here and there anyway, so mine as well just do it strategically. If I get to the point where I am just not making progress I’ll have to take a break… I just couldn’t resist when I saw the cover of that cookbook… Yum! So, be on the lookout for the first post… NY-Style Crumb Cake on July 1! Anyone interested in joining me? You know it will be lots of fun! Come on… Did you click on the link to Club:BAKED when you saw it before? No… why not?!?! Here it is again – go check out Club:BAKED!

I have not been good about posting my Sweet Places adventures… Although I have been trying to keep up by updating my Sweets Map! I just think that is so cool. Anyway, here is one from April…I had been scheming for quite a while with a faculty member to hit this cupcake place called The Flying Cupcake when we were at a conference in Indianapolis, IN – the very same conference to which I had brought my own geometric cupcakes. We looked for times when we were both free and we just couldn’t find the time to go together. We both  had pretty tight schedules. I was able to secure a little bit of time and told her I would bring her back a cupcake. She just wanted one… but of course I couldn’t resist buying a few more. The place was about a 20 minute walk from my hotel. When I had been walking for a while I started to think maybe I missed it… and then,  there it was just this little shop with this cute little awning right on the corner… It was pretty empty in the area and if I wasn’t looking closely I may have missed it altogether. There was no way I was going to walk this far and not get cupcakes! :-) They had a great variety of cupcakes in all different sizes. Check out their menu here. It wasn’t that cheap because not only did I end up getting some jumbo filled cupcakes, but also because I bought a t-shirt… I figured you can never have too many cupcake shirts, but maybe that is not true. Unfortunately, I don’t have any pictures of the cupcakes. I ended  up bringing a few of them to an event the day I bought them and everyone thought they were tasty… I felt kind of like the “Crazy Cat Lady, except I guess I was the “Crazy Cupcake Lady” bringing cupcakes with me everywhere I went… I guess people don’t mind too much though because cupcakes are so tasty! :-)  Here’s a close-up of their awning with their cute flying cupcake logo!

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!

So, how did you like the title of this post? These cupcakes were one  of those ones that were in the works for quite a while. I am part of a center called the Center for the Study of Mathematics Curriculum (CSMC) and I have gotten to know a lot of really great people from other universities. Many of these people are my Facebook friends and have seen my cupcake posts. So, when it was time to head to Indianapolis for a conference my friend AJ asked if I would make some cupcakes and bring them to the conference. Since we were driving to the conference I thought it might be possible. I asked AJ for some ideas… the conference theme was Geometry: Constructing and Transforming Perspectives. The first idea he suggested was origami shapes – AJ does not mess with the easy stuff :-) I toyed around with different ways I could actually make edible origami (e.g., rice paper, edible origami wraps), but then decided that I didn’t have time to mess with that. I then came up with the idea to make some geometric shapes. I was going to do the trick I always see on Ace of Cakes and CakeBoss and use as Buddy calls them “cereal treats” to carve the shapes and then either use candy melts or fondant to cover them…. Well, I tried this and it just did not go very well… Josh and I just ended up enjoying Rice Krispie Treats for dessert! So, I did some searching on the Internet and found a recipe for creating your own modeling chocolate. Here is what you do: Melt about 10 oz. of chocolate or candy melts. I used Wilton Candy Melts and I just melted it in the microwave. Stir until the chocolate is smooth. Once the chocolate is smooth add 1/3 C. of light corn syrup and mix until you form a thick ball (it will be similar to the consistency of a melting tootsie roll).  Then I placed the ball into a freezer bag and used a rolling pin to flatten it out. I let these sit at room temperature overnight. The next day I just broke up the big “sheets” into smaller pieces and started molding my geometric shapes. For most of them I wanted hard edges and so I would create the shape a little bit bigger than I wanted, put it in the fridge for a while and then take it out and carve it – I did this for pretty much all the shapes except for the sphere. The picture above is actually of the ones I made the weekend before NCTM for a party I had for my interns. These ones were red velvet with cream cheese icing. The ones I brought to NCTM were chocolate chocolate -chip with cream cheese icing. I carted these from my hotel in my collapsible cooler which was sitting in my nerd cart. If you are familiar with a “nerd cart” you now that it doesn’t keep things parallel to the ground and I obviously didn’t situate the cooler very well because two tipped over… (well, more than two, but Funda and I were not able to get these two upright). Here is a picture of Funda and AJ (the one who encouraged me to make the cupcakes in the first place). Thanks AJ and Funda for letting me take this picture! I was pleased that I did not have to take any of these cupcakes back with me!

So, has your  perspective changed from reading about these geometric cupcakes? I hope so!

Wow! Two posts in one day… I can’t make a habit out of this, but maybe I can get caught up at some point. A few months ago on Facebook a friend had this thing  posted about Homemade Gifts. It said that the first so many people (I think it was 4 or 5) who commented on his status and then posted the same message on their own wall would get a homemade gift. So, I decided to do it. One friend who commented on my status had a son who was turning 1 in February and mentioned that he was a Super WHY! fan. This is a TV show that is on PBS. I had seen it once at my parents house. My niece and nephew like it. I figured I would try and do something with a Super WHY! theme that I could easily mail to Missouri. Instead of sending cupcakes, which I wasn’t sure about, I decided I would just send some cupcake toppers. I printed off a picture of the main character from Super WHY!, Super Why himself (he actually seemed the easiest to make). I made the toppers out of Wilton Fondant and used my AmeriColor Gourmet Food Pens for the eyes and mouth. Here is what they looked like once my friend put them on her cupcakes (thanks for taking and sending me the picture). How cute!

I packaged them in waxed paper and plastic bags. I was worried they might be hard and cracked by the time she got them, but she said that when they arrived they were fine.

I know, it has been a REALLY long time since my last post. It was over two months ago (Pi Day to be exact) and even when I posted my Pi Day pics I had others that I never posted… So, I figure it is about time to do that so I can finally be up to date….

Going way back to… wow – December – I really need to do a better job of updating my blog. I made these marshmallow pops for my friends Aaron and Megan who just got engaged. I was going to try cake pops, but I usually have much more success with marshmallows… These came out pretty good. I dipped them  in white Wilton candy melts and topped them off with a little heart.

Then in January I volunteered to make some treats for our office birthday party. I decided to make the Carrot Cake Cheesecake I made once before. This is pretty close to the Cheesecake Factory recipe. I found a copycat one here. This is Josh’s favorite, but he was at a conference when I made this. I decided to dress this up a little bit my piping some swirls. I think it came out pretty good.

Then, in February I made these Brownie Heart Cupcakes from the Martha Stewart Cupcakes book for Valentine’s Day.

At first I thought I wasn’t going to be able to cut the hearts out of my brownies. They were a little hard, but I was able to make it work and I thought they  tasted pretty good!

In March I wanted to do something for St. Patrick’s Day and so I went back to Martha Stewart Cupcakes and found a recipe for

Brown Sugar Pound Cupcakes with this great Bailey’s Irish Cream Icing (see below). I have no idea why I can’t find a picture of the actual cupcake, but here is a picture of the shamrocks I created with some green Wilton Candy Melts. I placed one of these on each cupcake.

Bailey’ s Irish Cream  Frosting

1 1/2 cups (3 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature

1 lb. (4 cups) confectioner’s sugar

3 Tbl. Bailey’s Irish Cream liqueur

1.2 tsp. pure vanilla extract

1. Cream butter. Reduce to medium speed and add confectioner’s sugar 1/2 cup at a time. After each addition scrape down the sides of the bowl. After every two additions increase the speed to high and beat for about 10 seconds.

2. Add the Bailey’s and vanilla and beat until combined and smooth.

According to Martha, this can be kept for up to 5 days in the refrigerator in an airtight container.

I’ve got a few more treats to post, but I think I’ll put them in their own posts!

Even though I didn’t do too much work on my dissertation yesterday, I was doing something somewhat mathematical – I was making little pies for Pi Day, which is today March 14!!!! Now, I know that I usually make cupcakes and no – I am not admitting defeat, even though NPR posted this article in January claiming cupcakes were dead and that it was time for the pie! It just made sense to make pies for Pi Day!  I made 24 little apple pies to bring to campus. I must admit, I did not make my own crust or filling though. I used these little Keebler Graham Cracker Ready Crusts. I remember my mom using these when I was a kid. I decided to top the apple filling with my uncle’s apple crisp topping made from butter, flour, and brown sugar. Yummy! Here they were baking in the oven. The next step was to really make these pieces of pi…. So, I melted some green Wilton Candy Melts to pipe out the first 23 digits of pi and the decimal point. Do you know what those are? Well, in case you don’t here they are.

There is actually more than one copy here since I wanted to make sure I had some back-ups in case any of the numbers broke when I was placing them on the pies. It wasn’t too bad… not many of them broke. I was surprised… Using candy melts is much easier than using royal icing! Since I am such a dork I decided it would be cool to arrange these in a circle since pi is the ratio of any circle’s circumference to its diameter (at least in Euclidean geometry). I also wanted to give these out to people so I put each one in a plastic bag and attached a fork with a little tag like this:

I love the little tag. I found that image on the Internet and I added my little PhDcupcaker image and the text “Enjoy a piece of Pi.” It was so fun to make these.  Josh helped attached the black ribbon to the tags the day before so it didn’t take too long to package things up. So, I will leave you with my circle. If you click on the picture below you will see what the final packaged pieces of pi looked liked.

Happy Pi Day!

This is my first official Martha Stewart Cupcake Club post. Every month someone picks a cupcake form Martha Stewart’s Cupcakes and we all bake and post it. Jeannette at The Whimsical Cupcake picked Martha’s Candied-Hazelnut Cupcakes from page 284. You can find the recipe here, but if you buy the book you will have all 175 “inspired ideas.” I was glad that these cupcakes came up because I actually don’t know if I would have ever made them because I am not a huge nut fan. I agree with those that said that these were time-consuming. They sure were! My husband plans to take these with him to school tomorrow for a faculty breakfast. I think they are a good breakfast cupcake! So, here is what the batter looked like.

I must admit that I did not read the directions carefully enough! Anybody else do what I did? I read the Candied-Hazelnut recipe and it said it made 24 cucpakes, but then you have to go to the Almond-Hazelnut cupcake recipe, which only makes 16! If you follow the recipe on the internet it tells you it makes 16. So, I made 24 and that is why, as you can see,  some of my cucpakes are tiny! As I was doing this I thought… I must be doing something wrong… Oh well!

The candied hazelnuts were also not easy! It took forever for me to get the right consistency for me to easily dip and remove each hazelnut. In the end I got most of them to work…. a few ended up stuck in the caramel. Here’s what they looked like when they were dripping off the side of my counter.

This was also pretty messy… the strings of caramel were sticky and moving around quite a bit. When I broke them off I  couldn’t get them to be all the same size and they weren’t all straight, but that’s okay! So, here is a few of them all assembled.

I had a lot of little pieces of caramel strings that ended up on the wax paper I layed down… When I looked at it I thought hmmm… that looks like Martha’s Spun-Sugar cupcakes. So, I figured I’d place some of that on one cupcake as a teaser for those… I am not sure that I will be making those anytime soon because they also look like a lot of work!

Today was a crazy baking day. I also made some great Pi Day treats today too, but you’ll have to stop by on March 14 to see those!

One day…. a long time ago (before Christmas!) I was thinking about branching out from my usual cupcake and making some cookies. Since I am currently on “Spring Break”  I thought I should finally post these.

I was searching on the Internet for some cool Christmas sugar cookies and I came across one of my new favorite sites – Sweetopia! There were some really good directions about using Royal Icing to decorate your cookies. I thought the cookies on the site looked so good – really professional, like the gourmet cookies you can find. I thought for my first attempt  I would try to make some Christmas Trees. I found a great recipe for Rolled Chocolate Cookie dough in the Cookie Craft Christmas book. Check it out on page 7. They were pretty tasty! I made the cookies at home and brought them to my parents in New York for decorating. Once we got there, I made Antonia74’s Royal Icing that I found on Sweetopia. I kept about half of the icing white and died the other half green using some Wilton icing color. It took me a little while to get the right consistency. I had to add additional water until it was right. Sweetopia has some great tutorials and tips including the 10 Second Royal Icing Rule. Check out all of the great tutorials! After using a pastry bag to apply the royal icing I sprinkled each with some white sanding sugar. I am partial to the green ones – I think they came out really cute. I’ve been meaning to try to make some more cookies…. I just haven’t gotten around to it. One of these days…..