PhDCupcaker

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!

So, this one deserves two pictures… I actually copied this one from the Martha Stewart Cupcake book. I didn’t follow the recipe exactly, but pretty close. If I get a chance (next week when I’m on spring break I’ll post the recipe I used). I decided to make these because I was jealous that some family were indulging in cupcakes from Cake in a Cup in Toldeo, OH (http://www.cakeinacuptoledo.com/). So, these are great! They are mini-cupcakes – so tiny you can just eat one whole in one bite! Although…. that means I have been eating them all day! I love the salty sweet combination. These are completely homemade – the cake, the icing, and the filling. Although the cake isn’t the greatest on its own the sea-salted caramel filling makes up for it! Plus, the icing is so delicious! I promise I’ll post this recipe soon because you will want to make these ones!

Okay… So, yes.. this isn’t a cupcake, but it is a cake and my first attempt at using fondant to cover a cake. I brought this to dinner at a friends house for our cool math chicks dinner. I must say that it looked better than it tasted. It didn’t taste bad, but I don’t think I am a big fan of a cake covered in fondant. It is a chocolate cake with a thin layer of white icing covered with white fondant. All of the little flowers are also made of pre-made fondant. I just used different sized fondant/cookie cutters to cut out the flowers.

So, I am still behind on posts – so these are some cupcakes I made a few weeks ago for a friend of mine that finished her PhD at MSU.

These were chocolate cupcakes with cream cheese icing tinted green (not homemade this time). The graduation caps were made out of chocolate covered marshmallows and a chocolate square (Hersheys or Ghiradelli). You could also use Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, but I thought the marshmallows were better for a PhD graduation.

Definitely needed to eat these in two stages!

Here was my first attempt at trying to use fondant. I made these for my advisors birthday. He is the PI of a project I work on involving measurement in elementary curricula, hence the rulers!

I made two different kinds – chocolate and spice cake and even made my own cream cheese icing!

So, even though I made these cupcakes a while ago since I just started this blog I thought I would go back to the beginning.

So, here is my first “gourmet” cupcake attempt. Some chocolate ganache cupcakes that I brought to the Math Ed opening potluck. I had dessert!