Cupcake Jars from Last Week

The cupcakes in jars idea has solved the whole dilemma of shipping cupcakes. Since my friend Dan's request, I've shipped out several more boxes of cupcakes. Last week a friend of mine asked me to send half a dozen to her friend as a gift. The recipient is the co-chair of 80 Million Strong, a coalition advocating for jobs for millenials. Because of this, my friend wanted rainbow cupcakes in the organization's colors - blue, red, orange and green - with green star sprinkles on top.

Cupcakes fresh out of the oven

I may have mentioned this before, but when it comes to my cupcakes, I'm an obsessive perfectionist. I was able to find multicolored star sprinkles, so I picked out the green ones individually much to the astonishment and dismay of my mom who watched this.

Finished cupcakes, before lids

I really liked the way the rainbow cupcakes looked in the clear jars - very pretty. The rainbow jars are something I'd like to experiment more with in the future.

Carefully selected sprinkles

4th of July Weekend

I always feel like 4th of July is the turning point in the summer. It's generally when summer starts to take its course and establishes how the remaining summer months are going to be. Fortunately we had some good weather down at the shore and a lot of good times over the past weekend.

In honor of the holiday, I put together some red, white & blue rainbow cupcakes. Over the course of the whole weekend, I toted my cupcake carrier around from bbq to bbq. By Monday, almost all of the cupcakes were gone.

Extremely Busy Weekend!

This weekend I had 3 orders to complete - a surprise 30th birthday that was fiesta-themed, a friend's niece's 2nd birthday, and a coworker's daughter's birthday. The fiesta needed 120 cupcakes in an assortment of margarita, marble, and vanilla with coconut. In addition to all those cupcakes, they also had me do a fondant-covered cake to go on the top tier of the cupcake stand! The 2nd birthday party was just 2 dozen mini rainbow cupcakes, and the coworker's order was 80 cupcake truffles. I have a problem with time management when it comes to baking as it is, so it is no surprise I ran into trouble this weekend.

I thought I was on a good track. In fact, I had planned on waking up Saturday morning, doing the cupcakes, dropping off Morgan's order of minis, getting a mother's day gift and maybe even taking a nap before I had to drop off the fiesta order in Hoboken (I was baking in Toms River). I was so ambitious with my time that I probably even thought it was feasible to solve world peace in the extra time between the orders and delivery. I was so, so very wrong. World peace will probably have to wait until next weekend.

The assembled fiesta order. I was really proud of this!

Around 12:00 pm on Saturday, I started to get panicky and think I was not going to finish in time. I called my mom who was in Philly picking up my sister at least twice crying. I was having a major problem with the margarita cupcakes. The recipe I had was really difficult to follow and for some reason grouped together the frosting & cupcake ingredients and I kept adding the wrong things or the wrong amounts. Hence, 2 batches of cupcakes in the trash before I got a good one...hours later.

Close-up of the cake

At about 1:30 pm, my parents came back home, and I could have dropped to the ground crying tears of joy that I had someone to help me. I seriously would have never finished on time if my mom didn't come home. Kate was also a supreme baking assistant, helping me out both Friday night and Saturday by going out of her way to pick up ingredients for me and then driving me up to Hoboken to help me unload the cupcakes. My sister Melissa was clutch as well and ran to Michael's to grab me more cupcake liners being as I had gone through way more than I was anticipating.

By some miracle, I ended up finishing approximately 3:50 (I needed to get in the car to have them there by 4:00), quickly took a shower (which was for the best of everyone who was going to see me), and loaded up Kate's car with the 6 boxes of cupcakes (oh yeah, did I mention I made an extra 2 dozen of 2 completely separate kinds for a friend's party I was going to??), the cake, stand, 36 personalized individual cupcake take-home boxes, and my suitcase I need for when I go to Australia in two weeks. I really did not calm down until about 6 beers into the party I attended that night.

Individual take-home boxes for cupcakes

The drop off of all the cupcakes went so well. Everyone seemed really happy with them and everything made it there in one piece! I LOVED the idea to have the individual boxes. I hope someone else in the future wants to do that as well.

Sunday, I went back down to Toms River for Mother's Day and made the 80 cupcake truffles. I gave my baking intern (my mom) the night off from washing dishes, a fair Mother's Day gift I thought. I dropped those off today and am happy to be done baking at least for a few days. I never thought I'd say this, but I need a tiny break from cupcakes...at least until the next whim strikes me!

Cupcake Truffles - the blue were vanilla & pink were strawberry

Again, thank you SO much to everyone who helped out this weekend. This was the biggest batch of cupcakes I've done to date and it took just about every resource and bit of emotional support to make it happen.

Easter Cupcakes!

Mini rainbow swirled cupcakes

I went home this weekend for Easter and used the opportunity (and available double oven) to bake somethings I've been wanting to try and some old favorites. One of my friends gave up cupcakes for Lent and I've been torturing her with pictures of all these cupcakes on my blogs.

Middle Tier - rainbow, lemon w/ lemon and mini rainbow

When it came time to break her cupcake ban, she knew exactly what kind she wanted - the rainbow, so those were on the must-bake list. I had also been looking at pictures of cupcake bouquets all week, and knew those would be good to give out to some family friends. Additionally, I've recently gotten some cake orders, and being as it's been a while since I've baked an actual cake, I figured it would be wise not to let the practice round wait until the day the order was due. That's going to be a whole separate post.

Bottom Tier - lemon w/ lemon frosting, vanilla minis, coconut

I made the rainbow first, setting aside a few plain white ones to make coconut-covered cupcakes for my mom. Lauren was a huge help with the rainbow, and I think she's even come up with a new technique to make them more tie dye than rainbow. I'll have to try it on the bigger ones in the future.


The cupcake bouquets were pretty awesome. I had seen them done by other people on a couple blogs, and they looked pretty difficult. While they were tricky, they weren't impossible. I decided to go with mini cupcakes. I love mini cupcakes, they're so cute, and on the bouquet they were even better. From every batter, I made a batch of minis and set these aside for the bouquets.



I piped frosting on the cupcakes so that they resembled flowers. Years ago, my mom and I took Wilton Course 1 at Michael's craft store, so I have some piped flower background, but it takes a few to practice on before I get the hang of it. While everyone else was dying Easter eggs, I was piping all these cupcakes.


These flower pots were on sale at Michael's this week for only 49 cents! In them, I fit half a styrofoam ball that would serve as the base for the cupcakes. The cupcakes are anchored into the styrofoam using toothpicks.


Everyone who was the recipient of one of these bouquets loved them. I really think they would be adorable as centerpieces on tables for a bridal shower or other event. They can also be done with more and larger cupcakes. I'm looking forward to experimenting with these in the future.

Rainbow Cupcakes

My mom has been asking me to make tie dye cupcakes forever. So this weekend while I was home, I decided (a.k.a. was coerced) to finally bake the tie dye cupcakes. The end result ended up being more rainbow than tie dye, so I'm going to call them that. These were really pretty, and they're perfect for Easter/Spring coming up.

Dyed batter

In order to make these, I started out with a white cake batter and dyed it five different colors. For the recipe, I just modified my vanilla recipe, eliminating the things that made it more beige than white - the egg yolks and some of the vanilla. I also used cake flour instead of all purpose flour because it's whiter. It was my first time using cake flour, and I think it gave the cake a really nice texture. In the future, I will definitely be playing around with trying recipes with cake flour vs. all purpose. The drawback to this is that cake flour is more expensive and comes in smaller quantities, and being as baking cupcakes has yet to draw an income for me, the ingredients tend to consume an already embarrassing portion of my discretionary income.

First three colors in

I used Wilton gel food dyes here, but I'm pretty sure that liquid ones would work as well. The color probably just wouldn't be as intense, and you would need to use more of them. I've seen these pretty awesome looking neon gel food colors in the supermarket, but I'm not sure who makes them. I think they would make pretty interesting looking colors.

After I dyed and mixed all the batter, I alternated spooning it into the cupcake trays. Suspiciously, despite it being my mom that wanted these, I was all alone when it came to the huge clean up using 6 different bowls caused. Hm...interesting.

End result - pretty!

Inside look at the cupcake

Because the cake was so colorful, I just paired these with plain vanilla frosting. I wish I had some neon sprinkles to put on top of these, but I think they looked good even without.

The white cake recipe (makes 24 cupcakes):
Preheat oven to 350 degrees

Ingredients:
2 sticks unsalted butter, room temperature
2 C sugar
7 large egg whites
3 C cake flour
4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 C whole milk
2 tsp vanilla

Directions:
1. Cream together butter and sugar
2. Add egg whites and beat well
3. Sift together flour, baking powder, and salt
4. Add 1/3 of flour mixture to butter mixture and beat until incorporated. Add milk and vanilla alternately with the flour mixture, ending with the flour
5. Divide batter between into lined cupcake trays
6. Bake for 18-22 minutes, until cake springs back when touched