Descpicable Me!

Have you seen Despicable Me? If not, you really should. It's a fun movie no matter how old you are. It's about a super villain who adopts 3 little girls in order to one-up a fellow villain. His workers are his minions. One of my husbands co-workers had sent him a picture of some cupcakes that were the minions from despicable me wondering if I could make them. It took a while for me to actually have a chance to do them, but just last week I finally was able to take a day and make them. And yes, they are made with Twinkies and I bought those Twinkies before hostess went under.

Birthday Cupcakes!

I've mentioned before that I have a baking friend, L,  who I have collaborated with on a number of baking projects in the past. Well, her birthday was last month and her husband asked me to make cupcakes for her! How fun, right? I pretty much had free reign as long as I stayed away from anything super girly, like pink (which, I totally already knew to do cause, we're friends, ya know? ). Her favorite color is green, so I wanted to use that and I thought this would be a fun opportunity to try the whole 2 icing colors together thing. Its actually super easy and it was fun to see how the colors came out of the icing bag since I wasn't exactly sure how it would end up looking. I also made the letters of her name out of chocolate and put them in the tops of the cupcakes.

 

 

Spring Flower Cupcakes

I think I've mentioned before that I've got a friend who also enjoys baking a lot (and lives like 2 min. from me!). Well, a little bit ago, we were itching to make something AND a friend was having a birthday! (you can see where this is going..right?). Well, we decided to make her fun springy cupcakes in honor of her birthday :)

 

We weren't able to fit them all our original display, so here's ALL of them.

Super Bowl Cupcakes...that never saw the light of day

Goodness...I am so behind on posting! I have pictures from multiple things that I have yet to put up! My plan today was to at least put up pics of some Easter cookies I made, but I forgot I took all the pics on my hubby's phone and haven't put them on my computer yet. So hopefully I will get those and soon!

In the mean time...I will finish a post I started a long time ago from a cupcake mishap back in January.

I had wanted to make something fun for the super bowl and settled on some cute football cupcakes-simple, fun, and yummy. What could go wrong? They were baked, decorated, done. See...here's the proof-

Of course, some of you may have been at the same super bowl party I was and you're thinking, "I don't remember any cupcakes."

Well, that would be because they never made it there. See, I have this neat cupcake/cake carrier that *seems* like a great idea. I used it to carry a 9x 13 cake once, it worked great. There's this little tray that you put in the carrier has raised edges for normal cupcakes on one side and mini cupcakes on the other side. In theory, a fantastic idea that should allow you to take your cupcakes wherever you need to go.

In reality, the edges that held each cupcake in place were were much too short to do any good. we didn't even get to turn the car on before one bad move sent all the cupcakes tipped over on there sides into each other. There was no saving them. Unfortunately (or fortunately), no pictures post disaster. And when I say they got messed up, I don't mean a couple were messed up and the rest were fine...I mean the frosting was messed up on just about every single one. Awesome, right? yeah...not so much.

They still tasted good, so I'm sure I could have brought them into the party, but I just couldn't do it. 

Broncos cupcakes!

My husband and I had a chili cook-off/broncos game event to go to the other week. As what typically happens, guys were supposed to bring soda and girls a dessert or other item of some sort. It was a Younglife leadership event, and since I'm his wife and he's the actual leader, I didn't really NEED to bring anything, but he knows I like to make stuff and so let me know about the request. Since I was studying, I wasn't sure if I would have time, but it turned out that one day I really needed a break, and baking cupcakes seemed like a fun break to take. I bought new icing colors and was determined to do some fun colors...........Once I remembered it was for a football game, I figured Broncos colors would be ideal. I will totally admit that I had to look them up on the Internet to find out what the actual colors were (good thing I did, too-my guess was quite off)
I decided to make mini cupcakes since people tend to like the little bite size deals :)

Cupcakes!

When I made my cake pops, I had to buy a few decorating tips. I had not previously used decorating tips, so I really didn't know how it would go. Well, since then, I've been itching to use them again, mainly to decorate cupcakes or a cake. Well, this weekend was going to be the time! I made cupcathe cupcakes friday (with my new mini cupcake pan), bought a couple more tips at Michaels (since I had previousy been on the search for ones that would make tiny decorations for the cake pops and now I needed bigger ones), and got to work Saturday!

I wasn't sure how different it would be using homemade icing versus store bought icing, so I decided to try both. Both worked pretty well, though I had a little trouble with the homemade frosting keeping its shape or structure. I kept having to putting it in the fridge to make it workable. Whereas, the store bought was a bit easier too work with. I ended up with nice cupcakes from both though. Upon tasting, both were great! I've had multiple tasters/cupcake eaters confirm the good taste as well.

I made a batch of pink homemade frosting and then used food coloring to make the white store bought yellow. Then, disaster hit (ok, that could be some *slight* exageration). I had about 8 cupcakes left and no more frosting. I was curious to see how much frosting I would use since I had grand ideas for icing my cupcakes, and I used quite a bit ;) For the last few, I figured I would just make one more batch (or actually half batch, which is what i did before) of homemade frosting and color it blue. I'm not sure exactly what went wrong, only that something did. It ended up grainy looking and not holding shape well at all-even after it spent a few minutes in the freezer. I'm guessing I either didn't get the butter soft enough before making the frosting or my husband's finger swipe of butter before I added the other ingredients messed up (he thought it was frosting and it wasn't until after he ate a fingerful of butter that he asked what it was! oops!). Anyways, I learned a lesson and it wasn't a big deal. I just have a few sad little blue cupcakes that had icing spilling all over the edges since it wouldnt hold when I tried to build the icing up.

A few pictures to make you hungry :)