Better Late than Never

This weekend, I baked Valentine's cupcakes. I know Valentine's was last week, but these weren't baked for Valentine's; they were received for Valentine's. As one of my Valentine's Day presents, Bryan got me a Pillsbury funfetti cake mix and icing set. And since my family was coming over this weekend to celebrate Bryan's birthday a little late, I figured it was the best occasion to bake I was going to get. We ended up with a mixture of celebrations that was quite tasty!

I was very pleased with how the cupcakes turned out. That's because this time I took Ginger's advice and bought the Wilton cupcake decorating kit and...

... I piped for the first time! Up until now, I've been so afraid of pastry bags, I've been using my Pampered Chef dessert decorator (Wilton also makes one that is very similar) to pipe the icing. After having trouble on Bryan's Sponge Bob cupcakes, I was resolved to try it the "real" way. And Ginger was right - it was easier! Yes, I should have listened to her sooner. (I also took her advice and added an extra tablespoon of milk to the icing.) I absolutely LOVE the way the Wilton 1M tip looks when it's piped on a cupcake - very professional. And now I finally have a 1M tip of my own! Katy was right - it did use a lot of icing. One other thing I learned the hard way - the 1M will only fit on the really large coupler. At this point, I don't really see the point in buying the large coupler though, because I don't have any other tips that will fit on it - so what's the point in making it easier to switch out!?

As I mentioned, Bryan had bought me a Pillsbury funfetti tub of pink icing with white and red Valentine's sprinkles. I had a feeling it wouldn't be enough for 24 cupcakes using the 1M tip. In fact, it iced 9. So I made a batch of homemade buttercream to go with it. I was accidentally too generous with the pink coloring and ended up with a hot pink instead of pastel. But by fate (and certainly not by planning or thought in any way), I had just enough of each color to alternate rows on my cupcake stand. Before my family chowed down on cupcakes, I told them that one of the icings was store-bought and one was homemade, but I wasn't going to tell them which was which until they had tried them both. Bryan said he preferred the store-bought icing because it was sweeter, but everyone else preferred mine. I'll consider that a resounding success. Coupled with the fact that they were way cute, and I'm happy!

(PS - Stay tuned for next week. I've got a pretty ambitious - for me - project planned!)

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Snow Day Means Valentine's Cookies

I woke up this morning to an icy winter wonderland. I figured what better way to warm up both myself and my house than to turn on the oven and bake! Tomorrow is Valentine's Day, so that provided the perfect theme for a batch of tasty treats. Because the roads were iced over, I was limited to ingredients I had on hand in my pantry.

I found a good recipe for sugar cookies on joyofbaking.com that I could make with the ingredients I already had. I'd planned on baking sugar cookies and icing them with royal icing. However, after 30 minutes of cleaning out all my cabinets and looking through every item in my pantry, I discovered that my meringue powder had disappeared! I suppose I could have attempted to make the icing with egg whites, but I've tried that before and wasn't happy with the drippy, messy outcome. The meringue powder works much better for me.

So, out of necessity, I came up with plan B. I tinted the cookie dough with red food coloring and used red sprinkles on top. Still very cute and Valentine's appropriate! I'm out of vanilla extract (thanks to all the baking I've done lately) so I decided to substitute mint instead. I had to use liquid food coloring because I don't have any red gel color (yet!) so I cut back on the extract a little to compensate for the added liquid.

I've had some trouble with using cookie cutters in the past, but I'd done some studying, and this time I had a lot more success. Rolling the dough a little thicker and coating both my cookie cutter and my cookie-moving spatula with generous amounts of flour were the key. Refrigerating the dough for an hour before rolling it out also helped.

I'm pretty happy with the outcome, especially since these were a spur-of-the-moment idea. I think they would taste a little sweeter if I'd had the vanilla, but the mint leaves a nice, fresh taste in my mouth. (Bryan helped with the official taste test and gave his seal of approval.) Most importantly, I feel more festive for the upcoming holiday, and I cured my "itch to bake", at least for now.

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A Bikini Bottom Birthday

For Bryan's birthday, I had known for a while that I wanted to make him Sponge Bob cupcakes. The week before, I decided that instead of tinting the icing blue, I would use spray coloring instead to make it look more like water. The cupcakes were just a yellow cake mix. The icing was Wilton buttercream with Wilton blue color spray and blue sugar sprinkles. I also found Wilton icing decorations that look like Sponge Bob and Patrick to use as cupcake toppers.

Overall, I was very pleased with the way they turned out. When I was making the icing, I didn't have quite enough vanilla, so I used a small bit of almond extract as well, and it was very tasty. The spray was easy to use, but it is important to have good ventilation when using the spray color! I do wish the Wilton cupcake liners didn't turn so transparent after they bake. The icing was a little too stiff to pipe well - I should have used one more tablespoon of milk. But I was able to hide most of the piping with the color spray!

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