Happy June!

*phew!*

Is May over already?  My calendar says June, so I guess it must be, although whoever is in charge of the weather here in Portland is apparently stuck in early March.  If anyone out there has his number, could you please give him a ring for me?  We're running kinda low on vitamin D here.

So.  I did an awful lot of baking in the last month.  I had two big cake projects, one big cupcake project, and a lot of little bits and pieces in between.  The wedding that I wrote about before has come and gone, and I lived to tell about it.  Yay, me!  Do you wanna see how the cake turned out?  I know you do.

Look at the butterflies!  Aren't they pretty??  I seriously loved them so much.  My bride friend had pretty much given me free rein over what her cake would look like; which was both great and sorta nerve-wracking at the same time.  

Pumpkin Peanut (Curry!) Cupcakes

Yes, you read that right.  I made curry cupcakes.  I had to do something to really shake it up because I've been lost in an ocean of banana cake lately.  A friend of mine is getting married in two weeks and has asked me to make her wedding cake.  I've never done this before, and in addition to being extremely flattered, I'm also starting to get a little obsessed.  (I've heard weddings do that to people, and you know, I just want to be like everyone else.)

I'm going to be making a small tiered cake for the bride and groom to cut, and cupcakes to serve to the guests.  My bride friend has requested banana cake, hence the banana overload.  I have my super duper, fail-safe, totally fantastic banana cake recipe ready to go, but I also sort of felt compelled to test out other ones.  Just to make sure that the one I have is REALLY the one I want to use.  And guess what?  It is!

 I'll be posting more about what I end up doing for wedding, but for now, let's get into this curry business.

Hummingbird Cupcakes with Pineapple "Flowers"

Hummingbird cake.  I'd never even heard of it until just recently.  I think it's one of those Southern things, sort of like Red Velvet, that somehow never got on my cake radar until it started showing up everywhere.  Not that Hummingbird cake is everywhere, because it isn't.  But it ought to be.  In fact, if one Southern cake should be in every cupcake shop on earth, it should not be Red Velvet, it should totally be Hummingbird cake.

It's a petticoats & parasols kind of cake, and it beats the seersucker pants off of Red Velvet.

Feeling a little sheepish

Have you ever had one of those weeks that sort of grabs you by the hair, swings you around a few times, and tosses you into a heap in the corner?  Yes?  Then you understand why it's been so long since my last post.  Things have been busy busy busy around here, and I've been short on baking time.  Between the desperate ending to my weight-loss competition (more on that in a minute), my birthday, a surprise visit from my sister, a whirlwind shopping trip that almost got us grounded (hi, mom!), a big family get-together, coordinating Easter morning for my girls and having brunch at our house......well, it's a miracle I could even get my shoes on the right feet, let alone get some decent cupcakes together.

Eventually, I did find time, even though I had to spread it over a couple of days.  I can't say the end product was worth the time or effort, though.  Here, take a look at what is supposed to be a sweet little lamb cupcake but actually looks kind of like a demented poodle. (Ack!  Did I break my "No Dogs On Cupcakes" rule?)

My Cupcake Hall of Fame

I'll be honest.  This past week I've struggled to get a post up.  It's not that I don't feel like baking, because I do!  I really, really do.  But there are extenuating circumstances here.  I'm in the final days of a 12 week Biggest Loser-style weight loss competition, and I'm *this* close to winning.  I sit in second place with a big fat cash prize dangling in front of me if I can somehow squeak my way into first place.  So as you can imagine, baking cupcakes is probably not in my very best interest right this moment.

(I know, I know, what was I thinking starting a blog about CUPCAKES in the middle of something like this?  What can I say?  I like to make things harder than they have to be.)

Fortunately for everyone, I took some pictures of one of my all-time favorite cupcakes when I made them for a friend's birthday a few weeks ago.  Aannnd....for the second post in a row we have tan frosting.   Don't judge a book by its monochromatic cover, people.  After the first bite you'll see that inside of these cupcakes, there are a couple of very nice surprises......

A St. Patrick's Day directive

So first of all, I said the other day on my facebook page that I would be giving you two St. Patrick's Day cupcakes.  I'm amending that right now; there will be only one.  Don't think I'm a slacker or anything, because I DID make two kinds of cupcakes that would be appropriate for the holiday, but when the two were put side by side, one of them was clearly better than the other.  Let's face it, with the number of cupcake possibilities out there, you've got to really bring it if you want to get noticed, and while good, Martha's Irish Coffee cupcakes from the March issue of MSL just didn't make the cut.

Also, I whipped the cream about three strokes too many, and instead of a billowy mound on top, it was more like blended cottage cheese.  Oops!

Now, I know next to nothing about Irish cultures and traditions.  Personally, I'm about as Irish as a box of Lucky Charms.  But if stereotypes can be trusted at all, the one thing I do know is that Irish people like their beer.

Enter the Stout Cupcakes.  Specifically, Guinness Stout Cupcakes.

Not Tiramisu.

Today is the birthday of one of my very first friends.  I've known Eleanor since before she was born, which is longer than I've known just about anybody, I guess, so that earns her pretty high Friend Status.  She asked me last month if I'd bake for her birthday, and of course I said I'd love to!  (Although, I say that to pretty much anyone who asks, so I suppose it's not really a testament to my friendship, but whatever.)  After much discussion, we decided on a very nice Tiramisu cupcake that is soaked in a coffee-marsala syrup and topped with mascarpone whipped cream.  They were going to be amazing, and I couldn't wait for her to come over to get them.

And then I took them out of the oven.

Oh, my! Meringue!

Today was a good day.  It's Sunday, for starters, which means that I had a big, fat nothing on the schedule. The sun was shining, which meant that the kids could play outside instead of running like donkeys around the house.  We had a great dinner where nothing got spilled, and this morning I got to bake.  That was DEFINITELY the best part.  Especially since it means that after our great dinner, I had one of these waiting for me:

That, my friends, is no joke.  Will you take a look at that?  I had that for dessert.

Maple Cupcakes, eh?

Have you been watching the Olympics?  The closing ceremonies are tomorrow, and then we'll be done with winter sports for a while.  It's been fun having the Games so close to home, although I will never understand why on earth we can't watch events without such a heinous tape delay.  Especially when they're happening just a half-day's drive from here.  Honestly, NBC, what gives?  Figure skating at midnight??  How am I supposed to get up and bake in the morning when I'm staying up late to watch the Soap Opera on Ice?

Bad TV scheduling aside, this has been a fun Olympics.  I don't remember pulling for Canada before, but I've been finding myself just as happy when a Canadian wins a medal as I am when an American does.  O, Canada has been going through my head for two weeks now, and I'm getting less annoyed at people with French accents......they might be Canadian, after all!  So in honor of the Vancouver Olympics, I give you these fabulous Semi-Canadian Maple Leaf Cupcakes!

Chocolate Spice Cupcakes

The weather here in Portland has been absolutely glorious this week.  I know other parts of the country are still in the thick of it, winter-wise, but it sure feels like spring around here.  The crocus are up, I've got a few tulips and daffodils blooming, and my favorite flowering plum tree is now covered in delicate pink blossoms.  With the blue skies and balmy temperatures, you'd think I'd be itching to bake something light and springy, right?  Carrot cake, maybe, or Hummingbird cake?  Wrong.  Despite the spring-like conditions, it IS still February, folks, and today it was all about deep, dark chocolate and warm, wintry spices.  Allow me to introduce you to my new friends, the Chocolate Spice Cupcakes.

Streusel and a few words about toppings

Part of the fun of making cupcakes is the ability to get creative with fillings, frostings, and especially the toppings.  Once you start looking around, you'll see potential toppings everywhere.   I've topped cupcakes with everything from peanut butter cups to fortune cookies to bacon.  If it has some relevance to the flavor of cupcake or if it's going to contribute to the all-over flavor, then go for it!  Be creative!  But also be careful.....there are some things that shouldn't make their way onto cupcakes.  Here, I'll give you some examples.

Strudel.  Strudel shouldn't be a cupcake topper.  We love sweets around here, and usually I'm a "more is more" kind of girl, but not in this case.  Strudel is another dessert all by itself, so cupcakes + strudel = overkill.  

Schnitzel.  The only meat that should touch your cupcakes is bacon, and that's because bacon is awesome and can be eaten on anything.   Schnitzel, on the other hand, is breaded veal.  Baby cow is not bacon, so no matter how tempted you might be to slap a chunk of schnitzel on your pretty li'l cupcakes, don't do it.

Schnoodles.  People, we just don't put puppies on cupcakes.  Yes, puppies are cute.  Yes, cupcakes are also cute, so I know it seems like a natural fit, but I'm here to tell you that it just ain't right.   Leave the puppies alone.

So what does that leave us with?  

Happy New Year!

Happy Chinese New Year, that is!  Welcome to the Year of the Tiger......let's have some cake, shall we?

There we go!  That handsome guy is one of 36 fondant Chinese zodiac animals that I rolled, cut, and colored for my oldest daughter's birthday this weekend.  She turned nine on the Saturday, and we had a Chinese-themed party for the neighborhood girls.  They had a blast dipping fortune cookies in chocolate (and SMOTHERING them in sprinkles), painting their Chinese names, and eating with chopsticks......but no matter what else happens at a birthday party, the star of the show is always the cake, right?  Right.  So let's get to it!

A Pink and Red (Velvet) Extravaganza!

I love it when I have a great plan for something and it falls totally flat.  I mean, the falling flat part isn't so great, but Plan B often seems to work out better than Plan A would have.  That's what happened this week with these Red Velvet Cupcakes.

Two of my girls are in a belly dancing class, and for their little Valentine's Day party a few days ago,  I decided to make the totally faboo brownies from my Baked cookbook.  They were going to be great;  I had big plans that involved heart-shaped cookie cutters, marshmallows, and pink sanding sugar.......but THAT was Plan A, and we've already established that it didn't go so well.  Let's just say that when baking, accidentally using chocolate candymelts instead of ACTUAL chocolate is not recommended.

Anyway, Plan B was implemented at the last minute, and what started out as normal red velvet cupcakes turned into a gigantic Red-and-Pink-a-thon.   They were super Valentine-y, and the girls loved them.....but when have you ever seen a room full of 9 year old girls NOT love anything that was pretty, sweet, and pink??  Exactly......I have a built-in fan base.  Know your audience, people.

Not to be trusted

These cupcakes are devious.  They're sweet and cute.  They draw you in with their nostalgic charm, and then BAM!  They turn on you.  You'll think you are strong, and you'll think you can resist, but forget it.  You'll be powerless against them.

These are the lovely, adorable Valentine's cupcakes from Martha's cupcake book.  They're made from her One-Bowl Chocolate Cupcakes and topped with a Shiny Chocolate Ganache Glaze.   Aren't they the best?

 The good news is that these were SUPER easy to recreate at home.  The bad news is that they are DELICIOUS.  And evil.  And not to be trusted.  Did I already mention that?  Here, I'll give you a glimpse of how things went down at my house this morning.....

Orange Vanilla Bean Cupcakes

So you have a bunch of extra citrus fruits languishing around your kitchen and aren't sure what to do with them?  Here, let me give you a suggestion.  Make candied citrus slices and then DON'T put them on these cupcakes.  Just eat them up all by themselves.  Yum!  They're a little syrupy, so be prepared for some sticky fingers.  I suppose you could drain them on a wire rack and then sprinkle with sugar, but seriously, forget the cupcakes.

I actually didn't set out to make these ones first, but I *did* happen to have a bunch of random citrus in my kitchen (a by-product of making this beautiful salad).  I had about four small blood oranges that were creeping my girls out (?), so I decided to use them instead of giant navel oranges, which, frankly, seemed like they'd be more a bedspread than a topping on a dainty little cupcake.

These cupcakes are fairly straightforward (cake, frosting, topping), but they actually ended up being really time-consuming, and I was pretty underwhelmed with the end result.  I hoped they'd be really orange-y and vanilla-y, but.....meh.  They LOOKED pretty, but they were definitely not worth all the effort.  First of all, the candied citrus slices.  I spent about an hour tending a simmering pot of oranges and sugar water a day before I made the cupcakes, which is a pretty big time investment already.  Anytime I have to spread a project over more than one day, my enthusiasm drops significantly.  The oranges can be put into a jar and covered with the syrup and kept for several days, which is good, because you can get this step out of the way before you bake.  But like I said before, I might just quit right there....

So the second issue I had here was the fact that the recipe only makes 12 to 14 cupcakes.  That's pretty much a half recipe, compared to most cupcake recipes out there.  Coupled with the fact that you have to make the damn orange slices......well, that's too much work for too few cupcakes.

The cake turned out nice, but another issue I have with it is that it called for the scraped seeds from TWO whole vanilla beans.  Now, I happen to have a ton of very nice vanilla beans right now, but two whole beans for a dozen cupcakes is kind of pushing the limits of ingredient sacrifice.  They ended up with a nice vanilla flavor, but it was still pretty subtle, and I think I probably could have made do with one bean.

All right.  Here's a picture of the ones I made.  Now remember, I used blood oranges, which turned REALLY bloody when I candied them.  Actually, once I got them on the cupcakes, I couldn't stop thinking that they looked like sliced tomatoes, and I even got kinda grossed out a time or two.  Maybe something nice like a Meyer lemon would have been a better, non-gory, non-vegetabley choice.

That's pretty, right?  A little tomato-y, but pretty.  Martha's version has much tinier dots of frosting, but I didn't have the right size decorating tip, so whatever.  Oh!  Speaking of frosting, let me also say this:  the recipe tells you to use Her swiss meringue buttercream, which uses a full pound of butter and yields 5 cups of frosting.  Do you remember I told you that this recipe only makes like a dozen cupcakes?  What does that work out to, almost a half cup of frosting per cupcake?  Ack!  You have my permission to cut the frosting recipe in half, people.  Half.   The frosting was lovely, though, smooth and silky like swiss meringue buttercream ought to be.  

Oh, and I can't believe I almost forgot this part.  Remember my speculation that when I bit into this cupcake the orange slice might come off in my face in one big piece?  I was right on the money.  That puppy came off in one big sweet and chewy chunk.  It's a good thing I wasn't trying to impress anyone.

Orange Vanilla Bean Cupcakes

from Martha Stewart's Cupcakes

Makes 12 to 14 

Preheat oven to 350º

Whisk together in a bowl:

2 cups flour

1/4 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

Combine in a small bowl or liquid measuring cup:

3/4 cup heavy cream

1/4 cup fresh orange juice

1 tbsp vanilla extract

In an electric mixer set on medium-high speed, cream together:

1 stick unsalted butter, room temperature

1 cup sugar

seeds scraped from 2 vanilla beans

1 tbsp orange zest

Add, one at a time, beating between each one:

2 eggs

Reduce speed to low.  Add flour mixture in three batches, alternating with two additions of the cream mixture, and beat just to combine.

Divide batter among lined cups.  Bake until cake tester comes out clean, 20 - 25 minutes.  Transfer pan to wire rack and let cool completely.

To finish, use a serrated knife to trip tops of cupcakes to make level.  Spread buttercream (don't forget to cut this recipe in half) over the tops in a smooth layer.  Place a candied orange slice on each cupcake.  Fill a pastry bag fitted with a small, plain tip and pipe dots around edge of each orange.

Cupcakes can be refrigerated up to 1 day in airtight containers.

Hello, there!

Hi!  Let's get this party started here with some introductions.

My name is Suzanne.  I'm 35, married, and I'm the mom of four girls.  My oldest will be 9 next month, and my baby is 18 months old.  I don't work outside my home, but I do have a REALLY good hobby.  I bake.  Baking is my thing.  I almost love the process more than the end product, and I love to get into the kitchen after the girls are in bed and the house is quiet.  It's my catharsis, my zen.  And if you knew my girls, you'd understand that at the end of a day, I need some damn zen.

I've loved to bake for as long as I can remember.......well, maybe not as long as I can remember, but for a darn long time.  When I was a teenager, my friends and I used to get together in my mom's kitchen after school and concoct many, many scary things.  The green peanut butter Rice Krispie treats and the anatomically correct Big Bird gingerbread cookies were particular stand-outs.  Mom was tolerant of the mess, probably because she figured that even though were making X-rated Big Bird cookies, we could have been doing much worse.  Hmm....maybe she was onto something.  I wonder if that would be an acceptable alternative sex ed policy?  "Hey, kids! Don't have sex or do drugs.....just redirect your teenage inclinations into pornographic Muppet cookies."

*ahem*

When I was in my mid-twenties, I took a cake decorating class at a local shop.  Hoo, boy, was THAT an experience!  I'll tell you about it some time, but for now let's just say that I learned some things there that had NOTHING to do with frosting.   I did learn a few basic techniques that I can still lay down pretty well, but this was a beginners' class, so I didn't learn anything fancy.  Oh, but I DO know what a coupler is, and no.  It's not what  you're thinking.   Go make some cookies, will ya?

Okay, moving on.

People who know me know that I have a rule about birthday cakes.  And that rule is this:  Everyone ought to have a damn cake on their birthday.  Honestly, what good is a birthday without cake?   Don't bother answering that, I'll just tell you.  They're no good at ALL.  Cake must be had!  So I make cakes.  I make them for my family.  My extended family.  Neighbors.  Ex-neighbors.  Pretty much whoever needs one can have one, I'm basically happy to have an excuse to bake.

When my daughter, Piper, had her second birthday in 2007, I decided to shake things up a little bit and make birthday CUPCAKES.  Now, in early 2007, the whole cupcake extravaganza hadn't really hit.  At least, not here in my neck of the woods.  I mean, this is Portland.  It's a darn cool city, but not always super fast on the trend uptake, so the cupcake-instead-of-cake thing was kind of crazy.  Anyway, I totally went all renegade and made S'mores cupcakes.  I have some fab pictures of them around here somewhere....hmmm....

There they are.  This is the one that started it all.  Chocolate cake, marshmallow frosting, graham crackers.  My S'mores cupcakes were very good.  But they weren't RIGHT.  And when things aren't RIGHT, I have a tendency to obsess until they are.  I spent the next two weeks making batch after batch of S'mores cupcakes, all with different cake/chocolate/marshmallow/graham cracker ratios, I think I tried every version out there.  And eventually, I think I found one that I liked, but in the process of obsessing over S'mores cupcakes, a different, more general obsession was born.

This was the beginning of a pretty solid two years of insane cupcake baking.

I baked.  And baked.  And baked some more.  There were days when I baked two or three different batches, complete with frostings and sometimes fillings.  I was baking multiple batches a day FOR NO REASON.  I made normal cupcakes, fancy cupcakes, semi-exotic cupcakes, and downright kooky cupcakes.  There were no holds barred.   I loaded my co-workers and neighbors up with sweets, because even though my kids are happy to eat pretty much any sweet on earth, the poor girls were actually asking me to stop.  Has that ever happened in the history of the universe??  Kids BEGGING their mother, "PLEASE!  No more cupcakes!!!"  Totally happened.

So my point, (and I do have one) is that I've been around the block a time or two.  I can totally hold my own against  big-ass mixers, candy thermometers, infused ganaches and gelatin-stabilized whipped cream fillings.  That's what I'm saying.  I'm not an expert, I don't pretend to be one, but I am capable in this regard.  Maybe not many other regards, but in this one, I'm a-okay.

What I am intending to do with this blog is bake and decorate my way through my copy of Martha Stewart's Cupcakes and show you how MY versions of HER recipes/decorating techniques turn out.  I love Martha, and I can pretty much always count on her recipes doing me right.  I know they're tested like crazy by her hordes of minions, but the photos of the finished product often look like they came straight from La-La Land.

For example, these lovely Candied-Hazelnut Cupcakes.   Seriously?   What would happen if *I* made these??

Would they turn out looking like that??  Or would I end up with sticky candy crud all over every surface in my kitchen and tangled in my hair?

Or how about these yummy looking Orange-Vanilla Bean Cupcakes with the candied orange slices on top? 

 I can handle the candied citrus slices, but I'd like to know *before* I serve them at a party whether that whole thing is going to come off in my face when I try to take a bite.  Don't you want to know that?  That's what I thought.  

We'll see how things go here, but I hope to shed a little practical light on the perfectly staged and expertly created sweets that come out of the depths of the MSLO headquarters.  If it's good I'll be so happy to share the news, and if something is too darn hard for normal human beings to create in their home kitchens, you'll be the first to know.  Promise.