Good Morning ATC Community! and welcome to the official start of crunch time.  These are the days that we second-guess whether we did enough of everything and end up doing too much!

If you’re like me, you’ve baked a fair amount of holiday treasures.

But holiday week is a bit like a marathon and, in the home stretch, who isn’t looking for fresh ideas to keep inspired?  The challenge I set to myself is whether I can come up with a week of images, recipes, and instructions to keep us all – myself included – at 350F from now through next Saturday.

These Baked Ideas images are cookies, but so fresh and original they will inspire your cupcake decorating ideas. Here’s a smorgasbord of cookie decorating ideas from “Baked Ideas” by Patti Paige, along with the Baked Ideas’ Facebook page  and the video on the Baked Ideas mini gingerbread houses.  3,000 each season!

If you’re still looking for last minute gifts, Baked Ideas even sells yoga cookie cutters.  How did she do that?  Here’s her video on piping royal icing onto each one of the yoga posed gingerbread men and here’s the Baked Ideas gingerbread recipe.

Ah-ha!  My Muse gripped that one!

Today, I’m going to springboard those Baked Ideas into spice cupcakes with yoga shapes drawn on the top, including some Sandskrit symbols, such as “Namaste.”  And I know just who is on my list for these yoga cupcakes…

Now that’s what I mean about taking inspiration and giving yourself permission to be creative at the holidays!  What’s your idea?

Countdown:  6 days.

Zooey Deschanel likes Cupcake Wars!  In this 30 second clip from The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson Zooey Deschanel and Ferguson plan a cupcake war with delicious results.

You all may not know this, but I work for Jenni Bick Bookbinding, an Internet company that sells a variety of items from Italian leather photo albums, moleskine notebooks, day planners, calendars and so much more! And every once in a while we get in a fabulous cupcake item, and this one takes the (cup)cake.

We recently got in our 2012 Calendars, and lo and behold there it was, Martha Stewart Cupcakes 2012 Wall Calendar. Anything of Martha’s is visually stunning and very well done, this calendar is no exception. It was designed and put together with us cupcake bakers in mind.

They’re two elements that I absolutely love about this calendar– At the bottom of every month/page there is a baking tip or fact. One of my favorite tips is –Save Butter Wrappers for Greasing Pans, rather than discard the wrapper after you’ve used a stick of butter, stash it in the freezer inside a re-sealable plastic bag. When you need to butter a baking dish take out the wrapper, let if soften slighty, and use.

The second element that I love, is the recipe cards that are provided for the scrumptious cupcakes displayed within the calendar.

You could give Martha Stewart a run for her money with all the knowledge that this calendar provides.

Oh Boy, do I have a craving for cupcakes now!

Let us know if you tire of hearing about Katy Perry, but she is just such an efficient cupcake queen! Here she is again in all her cupcake might!

Love fudge?  Been eating hot fudge sundaes?  How about cooling down while heating up some “Lava Fudge Cupcakes” in your kitchen?

Lava Fudge Cupcake

Georgetown Cupcake’s Sophie has a 2-minute video, courtesy of The Learning Channel, claiming to “reveal the secrets behind their famous Lava Fudge cupcake.”

While she doesn’t provide the recipe, Sophie does provide several excellent tips, from using apple corers to hollow out cupcakes before pouring in the fudge, to easy-pour tops for filling and decorating.

So I dug around the Internet at bit…and found the Georgetown Cupcakes recipe for their chocolate cupcake with vanilla cream cheese frostings with variations!  Add your own fudge and, “By George!  I think we’ve got it!”

Mojito Cupcake

By now, you have probably all seen or read the news that two cupcake “recipes” were used in an MI6 British Secret Intelligence cyberattack of an al-Qaeda e-zine.  What I read several days ago and took as a bit of humor in The Guardian, a British newspaper, has now become worldwide news.

So I thought:  what recipes?

According to United Press International, the two recipes used were from Main Street Cupcakes (Hudson, OH).

Wrong.  The two, specific cupakes used in the cyberattack were the “mojito cupcake” and the “rocky road cupcake.”  Yes, the mojito is from Main Street Cupakes and it’s a “white rum cake with hints of mint and lime covered in vanilla buttercream with a Mojito buttercream garnish.”  But, the “rocky road cupcake” is from Cupcake (Charleston, SC), and it’s “dark chocolate cake plus chocolate icing with toasted almonds.”  This I found out by locating the original .pdf from the Ellen Degeneres show parodied by MI6.

What I did not find were “recipes.”

We may have to file this report of recipes from “The Best Cupcakes in America” entering the public domain under “false intelligence.”

Magnolia Bakery (c Sam Dow)

Let the cupcake wars begin!

Magnolia Bakery – of Sarah Jessica Parker fame – is about to face some serious competition from Georgetown Cupcake – of DC Cupcake fame.  The official announcement, made June 7, forecasts the opening of the NYC store in winter 2011.

Can anyone weigh in on who will win this war?

Will it be Magnolia with their “delicately textured lemon cupcake filled with a tart lemon cream and topped with lemon meringue buttercream,” now on its second owner, having already been sold once since its 1996 opening in Greenich Village?  Or will it be sisters Katherine Kallinis and Sophie LaMontagne with their “Valrhona chocolate cupcake with a whipped Callebaut chocolate frosting topped with a fondant flower” at the shop in SoHo?

If the yumminess of website photographs is factor to handicap this competition, my money is on Katherine & Sophie.