White Cupcakes with buttercream.

I woke up this morning and decided today would be a perfect day to bake. It was a little windy out and the perfect fall temperature. With the doors and windows gaping open I set everything up to make some white cupcakes that everyone is thrilled with.

Ingredients:
1 cup white sugar
1/2 cup softened butter
2 eggs
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 3/4 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup milk

Preheat oven to 350*f
Makes 12 cupcakes, or a 9x9 cake.

Start off by creaming the sugar and butter. The key to this entire recipe is to make sure every step is beaten extremely well. Once creamy, beat in the eggs one at a time. I beat each egg a good 5-8 minutes, and then added the vanilla.
Combine the baking power and flour and then add it to your batter and mix well! I mixed my batter about 7 minutes before I poured my cupcakes.


Bake a cake for 30-40 minutes, or cupcakes for 20-25. 20 minutes baked my cupcakes perfectly today.
Do the toothpick test to make sure they're done.

 While I left my cupcakes to cool on my cooling racks, I started on some buttercream. Since I made icing over the summer from scratch, I will not buy canned frosting ever again. It tastes terrible now. Rachel had her own recipe for that icing though, so, I went online looking for a simple, yummy buttercream. I stumbled upon a highly rated recipe on allrecipes and decided it would be perfect.

Icing Ingredients:
1/2 cup softened, unsalted butter
2 cups confectioners sugar
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
2 TBS milk
food coloring, if desired. (i used pink)

Start off by mixing the butter on it's own, and add in the sugar. Add the vanilla and it should make it pretty creamy. (for some reason, mine was a little dry before I added the vanilla.) Once mixed pretty well, add in the milk. Beat it until it looks like a nice, smooth consistency. I mixed mine for about 3-4 minutes.

When your cupcakes are completely cooled, start icing! I used a large wilton star tip for these.

I bought some cute pearl sprinkles as well as some edible silver stars a week or two ago so I used both since I couldn't decide.

My mom was nice enough to help me clean up today, and she hung out with me while I took pictures of these. She's definitely my best friend. [:

 

 

 

 

 

 

With love,
Staci.

Back in July I volunteered to make my best friend's graduation cupcakes. He was having a pretty big party for about 140 people. I just asked his mom to buy the stuff we would need and my friend Rachel and I set out to make a total of 170 tye-dye cupcakes. I think we spent a total of 12 hours on them. We just used boxed cake mix because it would take way too long, otherwise, but we made the icing from scratch. We needed a stiffer icing so it would hold the food colouring and it wouldn't mix together in the piping bag. I'm only sharing this here, because it's still something I'm so proud of us for pulling off!

I got the icing to be tye-dyed by just throwing different colours in different parts of the bag. No two cupcakes were identical at all and everyone raved about how beautiful and tasty they were!

 

 

just a tiny bit of what we accomplished!

 

not entirely in focus, but it's a pretty good view of the icing.

It's just nice to know what we're capable of sometimes, and to feel accomplished.

With love,

Staci.

Chewy Caramel

I found a recipe for Salted Caramel here yesterday. I've never made anything candy before but I absolutely adore anything caramel. If it has caramel, I definitely want to try it! I bought all my ingredients today, but forgot a pretty key element; a candy thermometer! I read the recipe multiple times and just didn't register that I would need one. So, I winged it. (wung, wang wunged it?) The caramel itself came out fantastic. It's chewy and it tastes better than store-bought! My only problem (and this is my fault, not the recipe's) is that I greased my aluminum foil before I started and my oil puddled on the bottom instead of being cohesively sprayed over the entire pan. The caramel stuck to the aluminum foil pretty terribly and I ended up having to peel it off, losing quite a bit. I made caramel balls with salt and white chocolate drizzle; Not quite the caramel squares that I was shooting for, but delicious none-the-less. Next time, I'll be using wax paper. There will definitely be a next time. [:! Maybe I'll post a picture of the caramel balls in my next post. It's too dark right now to get a good shot and I'm really not sure how they'll look in the long run. Next on my list is a white cake cupcake with homemade buttercream. I bought gum paste yesterday so we'll see what I make with that too! [;


With love,
Staci