Cupcakes » simmiecakes

I’ve been busy…

Baking, baking, baking! I went crazy this past week. Ninety-five sugar cookies, 8 dozen cupcakes, and one adorable candy corn cake later, I’m still not done. I’m on a baking roll. But I’m not baking rolls.

cupcakes

We had a harvest festival at work this past weekend. They have moon bounces, face painting, food, and pumpkins for the little kids. Employees can come and set up tables to sell crafts, food, and baked goods. I’ve been going for a couple of years now and bringing lots of brightly colored cookies and cupcakes for the kids.

leaves_and_webs

pumpkins

I do my part by stuffing the kids full of sugar and then giving them back to their parents. The kids are adorable though. This year I saw a little boy in a full head-to-toe monkey costume complete with a banana peel on his head. He was about 10 months old and had no idea what was going on, but you couldn’t help but smile when looking at him.

leaves

I spent many a late evening last week baking cupcakes, icing cookies, and decorating cake.

making_cupcakes

And yes, I do often bake with my computer in front of me. I have a minor fear I’m going to spill and entire bowl of royal icing on it sometime, but so far I’ve managed to keep it pretty clean.

red_velvet_cupcakes

I made chocolate cupcakes with chocolate icing, vanilla cupcakes with vanilla icing, chocolate cupcakes with vanilla icing and vanilla cupcakes with chocolate icing. And then I was very confused. So I made red velvet cupcakes.

icing_cake

Betsy got a hold of my camera and took a bunch of pictures of the cake making process. It was pretty cool because usually it’s me taking pictures of it after the fact or holding my camera in one hand, trying to take a picture of whatever the other hand is doing. Again, risk of dropping camera in batter: high.

cake_scraps

But cake scraps?! Perfect for future desserts. Do I hear trifle?

rolling_fondant

I decided to make a giant piece of candy corn cake for the harvest festival. I figured it was a pretty simple design but would still be cute. I started out by making a triangular shaped cake, icing it with some chocolate icing, and smoothing on some yellow fondant.

smoothing_fondant

Next, I kneaded and rolled out some orange fondant for the center stripe of the candy corn.

kneading_fondant

orange_fondant

Finally, I finished it off by smoothing on the white fondant.

white_fondant

But a giant piece of candy corn isn’t all that exciting, so I decided to add a few little figures to up the cute factor. A little ghost and a witch’s hat did the trick.

ghost

hat

And the finished product!

finished_cake

table

I think I might have finally come down off my sugar high by now…

Pumpkin Cupcakes

cupcakes_with_pumpkins

It’s pumpkin season! Pumpkin pie, pumpkin cookies, pumpkin lattes (if you like that sorta thing)!

Turns out these cupcakes aren’t pumpkin flavored, just pumpkin looking. I made them for Kathryn Hill’s son’s birthday. It was awesome. Pumpkin painting, giant apples, and the Not So Chilly Hilly Chili. I can’t say I’ve been to a 2-year old’s birthday party in a while, but I had a darn good time. Also, nothing beats watching a 2-year old shove an entire cupcake into her mouth at once. I almost fell out of my seat at the sight of that.

Also, full disclosure, these pumpkin cupcakes were Kathryn’s idea too. I just implemented them. They came out cute as can be and made my kitchen a lovely orange sight. And I LOVE orange!

sugar

These cupcakes aren’t too difficult to make. If you use enough sugar, it’ll cover a lot of your mistakes. Easy peasy.

I first just whipped up my favorite cupcake recipe and icing. Whatever works for you should be fine. A little bit sturdier icing will help when making the leaves for the pumpkins though. I used orange gel food coloring to make orange icing. I set a small bowl of icing aside before dyeing it orange to dye green for the leaves.

After your cupcakes have cooled (make sure they have cooled! Hot cupcakes + icing = big mess), top the cupcakes with icing. It doesn’t have to be neat, it doesn’t have to be pretty, it just has to be sufficient.

jimmies

Once your cupcakes are covered, pour out some jimmies, sanding sugar, sugar crystals, sugar pumpkins…whatever floats your boat into a small bowl. Dip each cupcake, icing side down into the sugar until it is sufficiently covered. I went a little crazy and picked up pretty much every orange sugar topping I could find and made a variety of different cupcakes.

pretzels

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Cookie Monster Cupcakes

So…I have a friend from college. He has a friend in New York. That friend in New York is dating this girl. Turns out I went to high school with that girl. What a small world.

Of course, you are probably wondering why you should care that a friend of a friend is dating another friend. Well, you probably shouldn’t. But what you should care about is that the friend of a friend wanted some Cookie Monster cupcakes. Which means, I can show you lovely people just how easy they are to make.

First, bake up your favorite batch of cupcakes.

cupcakes

Whip up some icing. I generally use some sort of variation on the Wilton Buttercreme recipe. The friend of the friend really wanted chocolate icing, so I added some cocoa powder and was ready to go. Pipe the icing onto the cupcakes generously. It doesn’t matter how pretty it looks because you are going to cover up your icing job.

icing

Next you’re just going to dip the iced cupcakes into a bowl of blue jimmies (yeah, I’m from MA, sprinkles, whatever). You could either get the multi-colored sprinkles and siphon out the colors you want (don’t do that), or you could stop by your local cake store and pick out the specific colors you want.

jimmies

The last step is how to make our blue cupcakes into Cookie Monster. Using some white icing, pipe on two circles for eyes. Then, either using black icing, candy, dragees, or something else, give him some eyeballs. The final step is just pushing in a small cookie where his mouth should be. I use Mini Chips Ahoy cookies, because I’m generally too pressed for time to make my own. But nothing’s stopping ya.

cookie_monster

Voila! Now you have a fun, easy, and tasty version of Cookie Monster (who I hear nowadays eats vegetables on Sesame Street, something seems wrong about that…).

Pumpkin Cupcakes

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