Butter Pecan Cupcakes

More experimenting. I wanted to try a recipe from a cupcake magazine that my mom got me called Simply Sweet - Best Cupcakes Ever! So I decided to make the Butter Cake recipe from it to test it out. +/-

The batter was really tasty lol. And it was a nice consistency, not too thick or thin.

It only makes 12 cupcakes too, which was good as I was running out of ingredients haha. Thankfully my mom got some more ^_^ (thanks again Mom!). She's funding my fetish lol. So there's a tip for getting cupcakes into the little holders nicely and that's to use an ice cream scoop!

It really works, because there was barely any mess from it:

Bakin'

They managed to get nice domes on the top, which is something that's kinda hard to do with some recipes:

I needed a flavor to go with the butteryness of the cupcakes, so I chose the butter pecan flavor combo. The frosting ended up having most of the butter pecan "stuff" as I wanted to try the new cake recipe as closely as possible (aka no adding nuts to the batter or anything). So the frosting got some chopped pecans added to it and a little bit of almond extract (which ended up overpowering the pecan flavor somewhat :/).

And to top them off, some freshly roasted pecans:

I chopped them up and sprinkled them on top of the cupcakes:

The nuts clogged the piping tips when I tried to frost them so I just used the bag opening and did "dollops" of frosting instead. It still worked out :).

Vanilla Honey Cupcake Recipe

Hi all! So I hosted a videogame tournament this past Saturday and I needed a fairly generic cupcake flavor as part of the prizes (the prizes for each tourny were some cupcakes and a $15 Walmart gift card thanks to my mom :D), so I made the vanilla honey cupcakes again. Since this is the second time I've made them, I feel like it's safe enough to make this a recipe :). This is an altered version of the classic vanilla cupcake recipe from cooks.com.

*Note, these cupcakes normally come out pretty dense from this recipe. Just be aware of that.

Honey Vanilla Cupcakes (makes 24)

1 cup softened butter
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup of honey
4 eggs
4 tsp. vanilla extract
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
4/3 cup cold milk

Preheat oven to 350 F.

Cream butter, sugar and honey together.
(The red directions are from the actual vanilla recipe)

Cream butter and sugar. Add eggs 1 at a time, beating after each addition. Stir in vanilla.

In a separate bowl, stir together all dry ingredients. Add to butter mixture; stir in milk.

Bake 18-24 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.

Vanilla Honey Frosting

1 cup of softened unsalted butter (2 sticks)
3-4 cups of confectioner's/powdered sugar
2-3 tsp of milk
1-2 tbsp of honey
2 tsp vanilla extract
salt (optional)

Cream butter on medium mixer speed until light and fluffy. Turn to low speed and add powdered sugar. Mix in the rest of the ingredients to taste. If the frosting is too stiff, add more milk. If it's too thin, add more sugar.



Enjoy :D!!

Addictive Sugar Cookies

Yesterday, a couple of sisters came over to bake at my place. When me and one of the sisters bake together, we almost always make sugar cookies. That's what happened then too lol. +/-

We use this one recipe from allrecipies.com, which I'll link to in the recipes section :). It's an amazing recipe, and after the last mishap, I didn't do anything weird or stray away from it. Even though this is the 3rd or 4th time doing these haha. So we started the dough. Cookie dough, unlike cake batter, is a lot thicker.

It's so we can shape them cookies:

The dough made a lot of cookies! It says rounded teaspoon, but even with that they still make so many. It reminds me of those minis o_o. Anyway, the past times the cookies came out kinda flat but still really yummy. Here they turned out different:

They were super fluffy! We let them cool a bit and them tasted them. They were too good. All three of us kept eating away at the cookies lol. I actually don't know how many cookies total we made because they were so good and we kept noming them. When we got toward the end of the dough, though, most of what was left were little crumbs that refused to form nicely into a proper cookie. So we just patted them down and made a giant one:

After all the cookies were done, we split up what was left and everyone got some to take with them. Still don't know what to do with that huge cookie, though o_O.

Sugar Free Lemon Bundit and How NOT to Make Cobbler

The typo for bundt (as in bundt cake) is there on purpose :). I kept calling it bundit cake when my mom made it lol. But yeah, my mom can't have that much sugar and carbs for a while so she decided to make a cake from a sugar free yellow cake mix. +/-

It doesn't look that much different from a regular yellow cake mix:

It was pretty cool to know that they actually make sugar free cake mixes, lol. And the bundt cake pan looks interesting as well:

While that was baking, mom wanted a lemon glaze. But the one in the original recipe has a lot of sugar! So that would kinda defeat the purpose of having a sugar free cake lol. We managed to come up with an alternate glaze using Splenda, lemon juice and some butter:

She liked it :). So once the cake came out, we poured that over it. The cake tastes great for it being sugar free!

So the next day, I decided to try out a fruit cobbler instead of the usual cakes and stuff (since we were running low on butter; cupcakes and frosting take up 2-3 bars each time!). We had a container of blackberries sitting in the fridge and I've made pie like things before, so I figured it wouldn't be that hard. I looked online for blackberry cobbler recipes and they all had some different way of doing it and either I didn't have enough berries (I didn't measure them either though :/), the cake topping would take way too long or it just didn't sound like it would be very flavorful. So I kinda took different recipes and mixed them together with my own "knowledge" of baking lol. I first put the berries in the bowl and put sugar in it. Then I took the sugar out (rinsed the berries off and cleaned the bowl actually) and did Splenda instead so my mom could taste it if she wanted too without it being 100g of carbs or something.

Bad idea. I didn't put enough Splenda in to make it sweet enough. Then I got the great idea of adding that black raspberry jam to the mix to give it more flavor.

After doing that, I followed another recipe for the crust/topping.

Not bad looking I guess, but I really should have tasted everything before putting it together. That would have helped A LOT >.< . To add to the fail, I added a bit more baking powder to the batter so it could rise as I added the jam and I wasn't sure if that was going to make it difficult for the batter to rise to the top. But I forgot that baking powder adds even more salt to the mixture! Then most of the recipes said to put the batter in first, then the berry mixture, so I did just that:

And it went in the oven for about 40-50 minutes. It looks kinda harmless:

It's kind of hard to see, but blackberries are at the bottom. So I tasted a little, and it was not up to par. AT ALL. My mom tasted it and her facial expression was priceless haha. I ate some more, and the more I kept eating, the worse it tasted! The berries weren't sweet at all and the crust was really salty (and undercooked a bit). So that got scrapped. Lesson learned (that my mom always told me too): always follow one recipe exactly the first time and experiment later! At least now I know why we follow recipes first. You don't learn if you don't make mistakes I guess :).

Vanilla Honey Cupcake Fun

Ok, break's over I guess lol. So today I decided to make vanilla honey cupcakes. +/-

There wasn't much excitement this time around, though. But that's probably because I actually used a recipe I knew this time. I looked online and saw that some people used a little less sugar to compensate for the honey, so balancing flavors was the only real difficult part. And I forgot that I wanted to make 24 cupcakes (for a surprise party for someone), but they only made 12. This was after I already finished the batter using the usual measurements, so I had to make another batch from scratch haha. The cupcakes baked very nicely in the oven.

And came out pretty nicely too:

The frosting was a bit harder to ration out the flavors for as the cupcakes have light flavors already, so the frosting can't have too much flavor either or it'll overpower them. The frosting was also vanilla honey flavored.

It was a nice touch to the cupcakes. It tried to frost with the regular round tip, but I'm finding out that's the tip I have the hardest time decorating with. Everything had a light and rich flavor, so these are my favorite by far. The cupcakes are still kinda dense from the recipe I used in the second post, so hopefully I can find a way to fix that without the cupcakes going crazy.

Basic Buttercream Recipe :)

'Ello again. So since today is a break for me from baking, I thought it would be a good idea to post a basic buttercream frosting recipe so you can give your baked goods that extra special taste ^_^. And my mom wanted to encourage me by cleaning up my huge mess yesterday, so I actually have time to post this lol (Thanks Mom!). +/-

This usually yields enough for one double layer cake or 24 cupcakes

You'll need:

2 softened sticks of unsalted butter*
3-4 cups of powdered/confectioner's sugar
a little bit of salt (to taste)

Put the two sticks of butter in the mixer and mix them on medium speed until really soft, almost white and very creamy (this is called creaming the butter but I don't know if this is the official way. It works for me though, lol). Turn the mixing speed down to low (so the powdered sugar won't fly all over the place!) and carefully add the powdered sugar to the creamed butter. Let that mix together well. By this time, the mixture should be white. Add salt to taste.

*You can use regular salted butter instead of unsalted, just don't add as much (if any) salt to the mixture. Tasting is your friend here :).

At this point, you can add whatever flavors you want to the mixture. I don't have any measurements for flavorings here, just be sure to go slowly and taste what you put in. If you want to make a chocolate frosting using cocoa powder, just remember that you need to put vanilla extract in it too in order for it to taste like chocolate. For the chocolate frosting I made, I just dumped whatever already had a chocolate flavor in there. Anything can be a frosting flavor ^_^. Also be sure, if possible, to taste some frosting with whatever you're going to put it on so you can get an idea for how the flavors react to each other. The frosting may taste good on it's own, but may be too sweet for the cupcake!

Enjoy!

Cake Insanity

*WARNING: LONG POST AHEAD*

Yesterday was crazy enough, but today was beyond normal amounts of epicness. The plan was to make two cakes for two sisters that drive us around a lot as a thank you gift for their time and gas spent (especially since where campus normally meets is about 30-45 minutes away each trip!). One's favorite cake/frosting combo was chocolate (and a few other options but I chose chocolate lol) and chocolate, while the other one's favorite was strawberry (and I assumed vanilla frosting). +/-

Never having done a chocolate cake from scratch before, I happily looked online for a choco cake recipe. Finding one, I go through the ingredients and think "Huh, I have everything they list. This is unusual, normally I'm missing somethin-" and I see BAKING SODA listed. Boom, don't have that. And it's kinda important, too. And my mom took me shopping last night, so I could have gotten more then. And my dad was sick, so I couldn't really ask him to drive me anywhere. Frantic, I look online for substitutes for baking soda. Some sources say there is no substitute, others say it's possible but not really worth it, and some say it's fine to substitute baking powder. 3 times as much. The research ended up being a good chemistry lesson, though, as baking powder apparently either has some baking soda in it or something that does a similar thing to it in the powder along with cream of tartar and something else. Wikipedia and Google would be more helpful for info on that lol. Anyway, I chose to take the risk and do the baking powder substitute, knowing that it could potentially mess up the entire cake if it doesn't work. Side note, that was some of the thinnest cake batter I've ever made. The recipe said it would be thin, but you can see how thin it was from the spatula (kinda):

Then the cakes went into the oven. This is where things started getting weird. First off, I used these cute little ~6 inch cake pans that my mom has, so the cake batter distribution was a bit different and the times were probably going to be different. Second, I guess I overfilled the pans. The cakes were baking fairly normally (so I thought) at first: the sides were rising, the top was starting to dry out a bit showing that it's cooking. Then, the center started to do this weird bubbling thing. It looked ugly (and kinda creepy) on the cake, but then the bubbling effect baked into the center XD. "I'll just cut it off," I thought. So then I notice how high the cake is baking. I don't know if it had to do with the extra baking powder, overfilling, both or something else, but it started to freak me out some as I didn't want the cake to overflow onto the heating element and burn/catch fire or anything. Watching the cake a little while longer, it seemed to stabilize and (supposedly) cook through more to where it looked like it wouldn't rise anymore, so I calmed down a bit. At about 12 minutes left (the first round, explained later), I saw the top rise over the lip a bit and I started running around frantically looking for something to put the cake pans on top of so they wouldn't overflow. Overflow was imminent. Thankfully, God blessed me with a cookie sheet that we have that's big enough to house the cakes but light colored so the cakes won't cook more on the bottom (from a dark pan). I opened the oven and go to move the (supposedly) almost done cakes, but the tops were actually sloshing back and forth as though on top of an ocean wave! Quickly and carefully, with the new hazard of the cake batter still being very loose yet ready to bubble over, the cake pans got safely onto the cookie sheet. The cake on the left just bubbled over at that time and a little got on the oven door, but that was okay since that could just bake off. I put the rebellious cakes back in the oven to cook some more, hoping that their undoneness was just some joke or weird baking phase and that they would be normal cakes when it was time for them to come out.

Here you can see the glob of overflow on the left cake. That one gave me so many problems DX. These were anything but normal cakes. By the time they came out after the suggested 30-35 minutes, they were still soupy with a semi cooked top! So I had to put them back in the oven for another 20 or so minutes. During this time (or earlier, I forgot lol), the left cake started acting up again and it's little blob friend started to creep toward the edge of the cookie sheet to overflow too! So I had to scrape him and move him toward the middle as well as move the offending cake more towards the center of the cookie sheet. This whole time, the right cake was just chilling there. Being a good cake. Left cake, why can't you be like your brother??? Anyway, after the cakes decided to actually bake somewhat correctly, it was time for them to come out and cool. By that time, I started the strawberry cake recipe. That one acted like it was supposed to. And it...didn't require baking soda. That was such a relief, haha. They behaved very well in the oven, like good little cakes should:

While these were baking (properly), I took the two little monsters out of their pans. They came out okay, but most of the sides were jagged!

The strawberry cakes, on the other hand, came out nicely:

Except one thing: they didn't taste that much like strawberries! I tried a recipe that calls for fresh strawberries, but all we had was a HUGE bag of frozen ones, so I just went frozen and used them. I even put a little more than what the recipe called for in there. Don't really know what happened; frozen strawberries shouldn't make that much of a difference but amen, it came out nicer than the other two cakes XD. After finishing the cakes, I started the usual frosting process. The first cake got chocolate frosting with some cream cheese mixed in for richness. The sides of the chocolate cake were dry, which really freaked me out and made me contemplate whether I should even continue with them or just wait until I could do the entire recipe properly with baking soda. But after cutting the dome off of the cake and realizing that the rest of it was moist, I went for it.

With the dome cut off and some frosting to spare, I put some frosting on the dome and tasted the whole thing. For a cake that got pretty messed up, it tasted pretty good! And the cake was kinda odd but still good. It didn't really taste that much like a cake, it tasted (and felt) more like a giant brownie! There's nothing wrong with that haha. So before I started baking (about a week or so ago), I asked the two sisters what their favorite cake combos were, but also what their favorite tv show/movie was so I could customize the cakes accordingly. I've always wanted to do modelling from fondant, marzipan, etc but a) never really learned how to sculpt (you see proof a bit further down) and b) didn't have the time or money to experiment with stuff like that. After some digging, I found out about this thing called candy clay. It literally is the consistency of clay, which works well for more complicated or intricate figures. And it was really easy to make, too. It's just candy melts (or almond bark or chocolate or...just use your imagination or Google) and light corn syrup. Be sure to follow a recipe, though, or else your clay will go wonky.

Here is it after sitting out to stiffen up overnight. The first sister likes the TV show called Bones, so I modeled a small skull to go on top of the cake and used some more of the clay for the lettering. I didn't realize how much the candy clay would soften in your hands after working with it for a while. It was almost unusable at one point! Plus, I was trying to copy the show's lettering, but because of my lack of experience with candy clay, as well as clay in general, the letters are the way they are in the picture. And I didn't ration the cake real estate out enough, so the "s" unfortunately had to be pasted above the rest of the letters. I should have made an insertion symbol like they use in papers for it lol. And when making the skull, I had this really cool looking reference picture. I was like "Yeah! It's going to look just like that in 3D!" No. Just no:

It looks like a Halloween candy, not a realistic skull lol.

Now, that one's done. For the other cake, I realized how much strawberry flavor it was lacking, so I made a filling thingy out of strawberry jelly that someone made and melted some more frozen strawberries in it. Hopefully it helped the cake out some:

It went in between the cakes to help them out some:

And the frosting was just regular vanilla frosting. After all this cake has went through flavor wise, I was too afraid to mess with it!

Frosting the cake wasn't that bad. The jelly filling kept making it move around though o_O.

And the second sister's favorite movie was The Emperor's New Groove, so I thought it would be a good idea to model Kuzco as a llama. Plus I like llamas. Sculpting skills are pro level here:

Close enough. And the two cakes together:

After all that hassle, I had to transfer them to the cake carrier. With two spatulas (they were stiff, not the baking spatulas). That tore up the bottom of the cake. Then my mom and I talked and she offered to buy better sized cake boxes. So, more transporting, spatulas and tearing up the bottom of the cake lol. But they made it there, along with those mini cupcakes. The two sisters were very encouraged by their cakes and the minis were a hit, the last my mom saw them, there were three left o_o. I had to omit about 16 upon transport because they wouldn't all fit though, but it was great that they were good, despite the anguish and chaos they caused. I think I'm taking a break from baking for a day or two. I might cry if I have to taste another frosting soon. Thanks for reading!