These Cupcakes Were Out of This World

White chocolate spaceships

Really terrible subject line, I know, but the second order I had last week was for five dozen assorted flavors for a surprise 30th birthday party. The birthday boy is apparently a big fan of all things outerspace related, so I brainstormed with his fiance to come up with cupcakes to reflect this. She was able to find a chocolate mold online of tiny spaceships, and I used this to make white chocolate rockets.

Box of space cupcakes

The flavors of the cupcakes were red velvet, cookie dough, chocolate Oreo, vanilla, and pumpkin spice. On the pumpkin and vanilla, I piped a swirl of dark blue frosting and sprinkled some edible gold glitter and silver dragees over top before putting on the spaceships. I thought these looked pretty cool, although again I had the same issue with the edible glitter migrating all over my face when I accidentally touched it. I looked like Edward stepping into the sun (geeky Twilight reference there...).

Close up of the space cupcakes

A Crazy Week & My First Wedding Order

Last week was absolutely insane. My birthday was Tuesday, and in addition to being incredibly busy in my real job, I had two orders to bake, one of my favorite coworker's going away party, and my own birthday party on Saturday. Over the course of Wednesday through Friday, I baked almost 250 cupcakes, a two tier cake, and 2 dozen sugar cookies. My to-do list was 3 pages long, but somehow I got it all done.

Close up of the cupcakes

The first order I had was for a wedding - the first wedding I've baked for aside from my aunt's. It was 150 cupcakes to be given as the favor. Half were red velvet with white cream cheese frosting and the other half were vanilla with chocolate frosting dyed black. Silver, white, and black dragees were sprinkled over all of cupcakes.

My apartment was overrun with cupcakes

These didn't take me nearly as long to bake as I expected. The most time-consuming aspect was individually boxing each cupcake. Each needed to be "glued" to the bottom of the clear plastic box and then tied with a ribbon and the favor tag. Fortunately, I had an all-star help team consisting of the bride's sister Linda, who I had done the fiesta order for back in May, and her cousin Andrea. They were such a huge help, and I can't even imagine if I had to tie all those boxes without their help.

Individual cupcake favor

I can't wait to see the pictures from the set up at the wedding and will hopefully be posting them here if I get them.

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.

Pretty Cupcakes

Recently I was asked to put together a "sampler" of cupcakes for various events - Sweet 16s, weddings, bar/bat mizvahs, etc in order to show what I'm able to do. I used some designs I've already done and also came up with some new. This post is going to be mainly pictures (which I learned this weekend is all some people look at anyway!). Most of these pictures were taken around 4:00 in the morning when I finished baking, so the quality of the photography is a bit lacking.

The final 24 that made the cut

Cupcake Flags!

Cupcake for a Sweet 16

Modified Golf Cupcakes to include a sand trap and water hazard


That glitter is edible!!

This one was my favorite

The woman's name I was meeting with was Lori. Not sure how

this would work out for longer names.

There's a lot going on on this cupcake, but I think it's pretty