Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Happy Birthday Jackie!

Today was one of my favorite coworkers' birthdays, and I knew I wanted to make her cupcakes for it. After unsuccessfully trying to stealthily figure out her favorite flavor, I decided to go with just plain vanilla cupcakes. For some reason, when I think birthday cake (or cupcakes), vanilla immediately pops to mind. Probably because it's my favorite flavor. I feel like birthday cupcakes need sprinkles too.


Standard cupcakes on my desk shot

Having no sprinkles in my apartment (yes, I know, it's shocking), I decided to decorate with some of the new tiny silver dragees I bought a while back. Dragees are balls of sugar covered with a metallic coating. There was some confusion with me for a while whether these were safe to eat because on the bottle I first bought it said "For decoration purposes only." After some intense research (aka Wikipedia), I discovered that while the FDA does not consider these edible, they are perfectly safe for you to eat. I have tested this personally myself. Apparently they used to be made with mercury finishing, which is not safe to eat, but they no longer contain mercury. Despite this, they are still banned in California.

The piping tip I used kind of made them look like roses

Have I mentioned my apartment kitchen does not have air conditioning? Halfway through this baking process, I was dying and sure that the frosting was just going to melt clear off the cupcake.

Jackie with the cupcakes!

I then made it to work today with my dozen pink birthday cupcakes with edible silver sprinkles despite also juggling my backpack (yay - my weekend starts today!) and purse and attempting to feed money into the bus machine. I would have sworn I was going to drop the cupcakes upon getting on the bus.

Jackie looked pretty surprised when I handed these over this morning. Hopefully it was a look of good surprise, not a look of "wow, pink is my LEAST favorite color" surprise.

5 comments:

Jackie said...

I loved my cupcakes!!!!
They were so beautiful i almost didnt want to eat them, and then when i tasted them i couldnt stop myself..Vanilla is my favorite flavor and i love the color pink.. You made my day, and it was definately a great surprise! Thank you xoxo

Anonymous said...

Another successful surprise. The cupcake swami strikes again!

Unknown said...

Tara makes the most delicious cupcakes! I bought the left over cupcakes into work and even the executive chef was raving about how good they were! Red velvet was a huge hit, and the cookie dough was delicious! Thanks so much tara!!

Justin said...

those are really pretty. p.s. why don't i have coworkers like you?

Tara said...

Thanks! My coworkers just think I'm trying to make them fat...Little do they know, I'm just trying to push off all the baked goods on other people so I don't get fat!

 
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