Race for the cupcakes!

August 21. 2010. I've already explained how the majority of my day went. But now it's time for the cupcakes. The little awkward things that I was most proud of out of everything I had done that day. Somehow, during the rushing around to make the birthday cake for my fabulous mother, I managed to make these adorable, awkward yet delicious cupcakes. You see, my boyfriend pays for everything and he's so good to me. I just wanted to do something special for him and since I don't have a job just yet, I couldn't buy him anything; besides aren't the best gifts the ones that are made with love and by your own two hands?
At first, I made them from scratch. I won't lie, it didn't work out. I must've missed something but instead of chocolatey goodness, we got these.
Now don't feel bad, I don't understand either. I'm certain you see the little yellow dots on them too? I'm terribly confused. But oh well. We taste tested them (what baker doesn't eat her goodies?) and they were ok. But come on, just ok? This is my anniversary; just ok wasn't going to cut it. So I grabbed a cake box mix (I curse myself) and went back to work.

Looks much better than the original batter. The other one had floaties. Bleh. 
And baking that got me this. Chocolatey goodness. So while waiting for those yummy concoctions to cool, I made some chocolate buttercream icing. I had originally wanted to make Swiss Meringue Buttercream, but when we tried to make it, it looked all watery; nothing like icing. So we went with buttercream.

The icing is just a normal buttercream recipe and some added cocoa. I eyeballed it. :P Then it was time to ice them, so I used a Ziploc bag, cut a corner, put a icing tip in it (I used the bigger simple circle), screwed it on, and made counter-clockwise swirls like DC Cupcakes does. I then took some strawberries, washed them, and dried them. I melted down a bag of semi-sweet chocolate chips and dipped the strawberries in it and put the strawberries on the top. They sat in the fridge for a while to set and then we put them in a rectangle cake pan and put them in the freezer for me to come and get the next day.

So this is about how it went. My boyfriend knew nothing of these cupcakes the whole time, not even when we were all piled in my sister's kitchen for my mother's party. So the morning of the Anni, I got him to take me to my sister's to 'drop off some coffee' and I picked them up. I carried them to the car with a small kitchen towel covering them. He looked really confused but didn't try and peek when I told him he couldn't see until we got to his house. Instead, he bugged me with questions about what it could be the whole way. XP Once we got there, I set them on the counter in his kitchen and uncovered them. His face? Best look ever. He immediately kissed me in thanks and dove into the first cupcake. I think that's the best praise for a job well done. (: When you've worked so hard on something and you can see that the person it was for absolutely loves it. Random brainstorm? Sometimes the best thanks is unspoken, I think. His dad got one too. :P They were really good, and it's a simple recipe for such a classy look.  The rest of our day was amazing. (:

-you know I'm sugarlaced-

Happy Birthday

August 21, 2010. Ok. So this was how my morning started. 
Coffee and a poppy seed muffin. Which mind you, I had never tried before. Pretty good though. Lemon-y.
Anyways, I had to make my mother's birthday cake, pumpkin pies and my anniversary cupcakes within the course of like a few hours. Its ok though, I'll have to get used to it for my bakery. So we sat down to eat some breakfast and attempted to ignore little children as we plotted the cake's design. Checked the time, not much time left. Luckily we had baked the cakes off the night before. So we just had to stack them and dirty ice them. 

 The concept here was rather simple. Shove together two cakes, put a layer of buttercream on them, add the icing you really want, decorate and top with fondant lid. Yeah, easier said than done. But not too bad. Next we iced it in blue buttercream. Then we used lollipop sticks to make a argyle print in the icing. After that we used cupcake pearls for the apexes. I did it once and the argyle wasn't even so the pearls weren't either; so my sister re-did it. The argyle was still uneven but the pearls were straight. We made the lid out of home-made rice crispy treats. Then we worked some epic magic on the fondant. We used store bought fondant (tastes like ass) due to lack of time. It was just one of those random successes I guess. It doesn't look amazing but it looks decent for a kind of first try with fondant, I think. We put the lid on a cake board and cut the cake board so it wouldn't show. Then we stacked the lid on top of our blue cake thing. This would be the finished product. 

The lid ^ What I did was use white fondant to cover the rice crispy treats, cut dark brown into strips to make the ribbon, cut light brown into strips and then shaped it into this bow, rolled black into little balls to make a black pearl bracelet (I also put some confectioner's sugar on a little cylinder to make a clasp), and then I got an edible pen and cut some white fondant into a gift tag shape and wrote on it. That's pretty much it. Well, Mom liked it. 

-you know I'm sugarlaced-