Cupcakes for a Baby Girl

Here are pictures of cupcakes I made for a baby shower for a baby girl. I wanted pink cupcakes, so I used a red velvet cake recipe and went light on the red coloring.

Angel on a cloud:

3 little bears:

The cupcakes below are supposed to be a baby in a baby carriage... The flowers are the wheels. The blue thing at the mouth is a pacifier. No matter how much my husband squinted, he couldn't see the vision I was trying to create. LOL

I decorated the cupcake stand instead of making individual cupcake wrappers as I did in a previous post.

Final presentation

If you decorate the cupcake stand keep in mind that the cupcakes will need to be displayed at eye level. Otherwise, the cupcakes on the lower levels will be blocked as shown below.

Baby Shower Cupcakes

The ladies at our church (Winchester Corp Salvation Army) pitched in to throw a baby shower for a member that grew up in the church and I had the honor of making the cupcakes!
I found my inspiration on the web.

The ducky ones I found were used to advertise these cute cupcake wrappers. However, at $1 a piece, the wrappers were not even considered. Instead I made cupcake wrappers using doilies given to me by a friend. (Thanks, Gale)

I used a 12 inch doily to make the cupcake wrapper

picture courtesy of AlamoSweets on cakecentral.com


A lot of people must have liked the edible pearls shown in the duck picture above because they were sold out every place I looked. I decided to make my own using royal icing. I tried piping orbs but they did not come out perfectly round. After a few trial and errors, I found that letting the odd shapes dry for 2-4 minutes, I could round them using my index finger and palm. When they were completely dried, I tossed them in Super Pearl dust to give them a wonderful sheen.

Since the baby was going to be a boy, I went with blue frosting and pearls.


Here's the finished product. Cute, aren't they?

I found the ducks at http://stores.ebay.com/Monkey-Dog-Balloons. They were easy to work with and they shipped my order very quickly. They even combined the postal charges on multiple items I ordered. I like that!


I fell in love with this baby bird cupcake from Martha Stewart's web site.



Unfortunately, my birds turned out looking more like the Michelin man. I overheard one person asking her friend "Is this a frog?" Back to the piping board for me. :-D
I used tip #12 for the birds. Next time I'm going to make the birds using the coupler without a tip and use longer strands of coconut for the nest.


The daisies were made using gumpaste. It's a lot of fun to work with.... it's a lot like play dough. It brings the kid out in you.

TWD: Chocolate chocolate cupcakes

After living vicariously through all the "TWD" bakers out there, I finally have jumped on the bandwagon. (Yes, the October deadline had a lot to do with motivating me)

This weeks recipe, Chocolate-Chocolate Cupcakes, was selected by Clara of I Heart Food4Thought You can find the recipe on her website or on pages 215-217 of Dorie Greenspan's "Baking From my Home to Yours"

Although I carefully weighed all my ingredients and took the cupcakes out of the oven the second the tops of the cakes were dry and springy to the touch and a knife inserted into the center came out clean (21-22 mins) as Dorie described, I found these cupcakes to be on the dry side.

I only had one issue with the recipe... the step where you fold the melted chocolate into the batter, ...I scraped all the chocolate into the batter at once, grabbed my spatula to fold it in, and hit a big lump of chocolate! The entire amount of melted chocolate had solidified! grrrrrrrrr. (the chocolate was around 74 degrees, the cake batter around 66 degrees when I merged the two.)

I removed the big lump of chocolate out, wiped off all the cake mix that I could, and stuck it in the microwave until it was pliable again. Then I mixed it into the batter slowly. I think there were still some small pieces of chocolate that solidified but they seemed to have melted when I baked the cupcakes.

I wanted to do something different with the cupcakes so I used the vanilla cream filling that Baking Bites posted on her site. For half of the cupcakes, I used her method of filling the cupcakes ,

for the other half, I used a faster method... I shoved the piping tip into the cupcake and squeezed the pastry bag until the cupcake swelled. (some of them cracked because I squeezed too much. See the one on the left below)

The cupcakes using Baking Bites method (shown below) looked nicer and more symmetrical than the ones I filled by shoving the tip into. (shown above) However, I'm probably the only one who noticed.

I'm have a lot to learn when it comes to baking... especially when it comes to chocolate. I really, really don't like chocolate. Not only does it end up all over my kitchen, but it doesn't behave the way it's supposed to. Please leave me a message on what I need to do differently to get chocolate under control. Perhaps there's an obedience training class out there that you could recommend?