We’ve all had those days in the kitchen where something happens and we’re unexpectedly left with a cupcake tray that has empty liners and the conundrum of whether to reconcile the situation with fewer or smaller cupcakes. Whether you dismiss it as a consequence of the spill at the hands of favorite your little helper or the presence of too many willing volunteers offering their batter-sampling services, you might shrug it off and move on to the next thing. But when that situation arises and you’re alone in the kitchen, you realize the sad truth that the culprit might actually have been your trusty box of cake mix all along.

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Owls seem to be all the rage lately! Why wouldn’t they be with all the cute owl things I see around – checks, wallets, earrings, etc. You want it (with owls), you got it!

If you want Owl Cupcakes, we got those too. These are so stinking adorable!

Reeses Owl Cupcakes from Inside BruCrew Life

Thinking of what to put together for your New Year’s Eve party?

Why not cook up your brew instead of drinking it?  Here’s a recipe for Guinness and Bailey Irish Cupcakes that strikes me as rather top-o-the-morning.

Take it one step further, and here’s a recipe for Chocolate Guinness and Whiskey Cupcakes with Bailey’s Frosting.  I’d put this into the later-in-the-day category.

And this recipe variation includes a bittersweet ganache with whiskey option within the Guinness Cupcake.

Cheers!

Merry Christmas Everyone! I woke up this morning to see it spitting snow outside and all I could say was, “Yay!”. I am not a huge fan of snow, but, I always like to have some on Christmas, it really make it feels like Christmas when it snows and there is snow on the ground.

In honor of the spitting snow in New Hampshire, where I grew up and am spending Christmas with my parents, brother and lovely dog, I have found these amazing snowflake cupcakes. The fact that they are pink makes it a million times better.

Pink Snowflake Cupcakes from Glorious Treats

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.

This is it.  Your chance to enter Ghirardelli fame and Facebook feature.

Recipe for your success:

1 – “Like” the Ghirardelli page on Facebook.

2 – Fill in your basic information, upload your recipe, and upload your mouth-watering photograph.

3 – Win!

Perhaps we could do a group ATC entry?

I’d like to know of anyone’s opinion on baking with Ghirardelli and whether you find the chocolate richer, softer, and needing more cocoa powder to balance for spreading and shaping?  What about the Ghirardelli Intense Dark?  And the Ghirardelli white that I nibbled at while baking with it last week – do you do that too?  Are we shorting our batches or should we just write them as 10 oz broken into small bits with remaining 2 oz for the cook!

What is it about Thanksgiving that invariably leads to pleas from turkeys for clemency?  Do we see similar images from cows at Fourth of July?  Fish and shrimp at New Year’s Eve?

Perhaps the answer is that we draw the turkey as children, tracing our hands with crayons, turning our thumb into the smiling turkey face, our fingers into the colorful feathers.  Seemingly every child is connected to turkeys, while all other animals are, well, options.

In an hour-long scan of turkey cupcakes, ranging from cupcakes made from ground turkey to cupcakes celebrating turkeys, this is the one turkey who captured my heart and made me think twice about the bird in my refrigerator.  If I had seen this handsome Tom earlier this week, perhaps I would have served up imitation cupcakes, under silvery domes, to be lifted to the surprise of my guests.

(Maybe next year.)

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Since watermelon the fruit is such a fun, messy, summer treat, what opportunities doe we have to use watermelon fruit in a cupcake?

From an Indiana kitchen came a watermelon cupcake recipe with instructions for making your own wrappers on a silhouette machine.  The recipe uses watermelon gelatin – very neat.

Getting warmer, I found a recipe for watermelon cupcake frosting that offers a substitution of watermelon juice for milk.

Still on my quest, I landed on What About Watermelon?, where I found a cake recipe with 1-1/3 C of watermelon, using watermelon juice in the frosting.  All the fun of the fruit and no napkins required!

Rosewater.  A near completely forgotten about ingredient, except that I was daydreaming of France and how often the bakeries feature edible flowers.

So, a petit selection of the loveliest of the rosewater cupcake recipes I could find.

How about Organic White Chocolate Rosewater Cupcakes?  Yum.  The cupcake includes the white chocolate and coconut milk.  The frosting is a meringue buttercream with 3T of rosewater.

Then, let’s get a little carried away with Persian Love Cupcakes.  Candied rose petals on top.  Lemon peel and cardamon seeds within.  A frosting with rosewater, saffron threads, and pistachios.  C’est l’amour!

Just in case you don’t have rosewater handy, here’s a recipe to make your own rosewater at home.  Note that every type of rose creates a different rose water, naturally, so this, too, becomes a lovely opportunity to play in the kitchen.  From one batch of cupcakes to the next, using a different rose’s water will create a different flavor.

Papaya.  I never buy this fruit here in Upstate New York, having convinced myself that to enjoy it, I would need to be somewhere tropical.

Not true, ATC readers! and here are the papaya cupcake recipes to prove it.

Start with Coconut Rice Pudding Stuffed Cupcakes with Ginger Cream Cheese Frosting & Papaya.  A long name for papaya used as a garnish to top off an unusual cupcake.  You’ll also notice that I’m continuing my recent penchant for lime…

Get more adventurous with Papaya Cupcake.  This recipe appears in Spanish, but, if you’re using Google Chrome as your Internet browser, this nifty top bar pops up asking if you want the page translated into English – answer? yes.  The tip on putting a dye tube inside the frosting piping bag to get the beautiful swirls is just OTT.  I discovered La Depensa del Gnomo during my global cupcakes week, and he never fails to impress.

May this inspire you to venture into the land of tropical fruits this summer no matter your climate!

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!”

From these fleetingly hot days of summer in Upstate New York, I thought I’d take you on a getaway this week to go baking cupcakes in kitchens in foreign countries.  I’ve scouted out the bloggs for the best-looking cupcakes with photo instructions and recipes.

Summer Cupcakes

We start our tour with the cutest summer cupcakes on the planet!  How creative are these?  La Despensa Del Gnomo blog uses the universal image of the drink umbrella with fondants to create beach scenes, from towels to starfish to shovels.  The cupcakes are bottomed-off with palm tree wrappers.

Can any of our Spanish-speaking readers act as our translator tour guide?  One of the ingredients is that yum word “Nutella.”  But just how it fits into the cupcake is the question.

Do take a moment to click on her “cupcakes” category in the blog.  One of her recipes is for Papaya cupcakes – another great summer cupcake idea.  How fun to wander through foreign kitchens to bring their local flavors to our own!

LGM cupcakes

I remain an enthusiastic fan of Disney’s Toy Story series and its LGMs (the “Little Green Men”).  Here is the classic out-take of LGMs with “the claw.”

Needless to say, this recipe for LGM cupcakes is a keeper in my book.

In fact, this Disney family website has an entire section of recipes with several terrific cupcake recipes such as Lightning McQueen from “Cars,” Jack Skellington from “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” Owl from “Winnie-the-Pooh,” panda bears from “Mulan,” and more.

I tossed up today between Gin (yes please!), Ginseng (dubious for a cupcake) and the ever versatile, Ginger!  And in the end Ginger won!  And why wouldn’t it, perfect for the sweet dessert or for the main course, pickled, candied, ground or raw, it has a million and one uses, so it is only to be expected to find it somewhere in the kitchen!

This particular recipe I have chosen today uses ground ginger and candied ginger, and looks amazing to boot!  The recipe inspired by crockery is from the great baking website Not Quite Nigella!  I’m sure you’ll agree, they look pretty darn pretty in their Queen of Hearts styling!

If you are looking for a seriously rich and decadently good cupcake, then this one from Kevin & Amanda is for you.  But you do really need to have a seriously sweet tooth… it is certainly not for the faint hearted!

Rich, moist  and amazingly rich the recipe for these Brownie Batter Chocolate Fudge Cupcakes with Outrageously Rich Chocolate Indulgence Frosting, click here!

Eggnog is awesome, but these cupcakes from Chockylit look even better, and why is that?  Well I am glad you asked, the reason is the Bourbon Caramel Cream Cheese Frosting!!!  I haven’t made this version before, but I have made a very similar cupcake, which if you like eggnog is divine.  Most of all though I want to try the frosting, which I think would probably work well on lots of different types of cupcakes.

So whether you try these cupcakes now, for Christmas in July, or wait till the official date in December, it is a recipe worth filing away!

What could be a great ingredient for the letter D?  I admit I have been a little stumped!  But in the end it hit me, what else but Dr Pepper?

Down here in Aussie land, Dr Pepper cannot be found in many places… there was once a day when Dr Pepper tried to storm our shores in force, but for some reason cherries and Aussies don’t mix and it quickly disappeared from our supermarket shelves.  You can still get it in some specialty stores, though…

And I think it would be fantastic in a cupcake, like in this one from Cupcakeables!  The cupcake here can be made either from scratch or from packet mix, so whether you are looking for a simple quick fix with a bit of pizazz or want to experiment with a potential future masterpiece you are sure to have fun with these!

Cherry Dr Pepper cupcakes from Cupcakeables

So you thought I would go with banana, right?  Well I am not sure about making this too healthy and seeing I featured fruit yesterday, I thought today we could do with a Triple dose of sugar!

Triple Butterscotch Cupcakes

This cupcake is from the delightful Annie’s Eats.  I have featured her cupcakes before because I am yet to try one of her recipes and not be totally in love the results, and I have been eyeing these wonderful cupcakes off since she published the recipe in November last year.

There are three parts to this cupcake, the cake, the frosting and then the butterscotch sauce, which should be applied just before serving or eating, for MAXIMUM butterscotch appeal! But why read about it? see the recipe here.

Today I am going to do something a little different, that is, feature a different cupcake each couple of days… for each I will share with you a fantastic cupcake blog which features the cupcake recipes with that alpha ingredient!  Each of these blogs have the recipe listed so you can try and make these yourself!

So first up (unless you have mastered reciting the alphabet backwards) is A, and what better than an apple! (With a name of AppleCupcake, I couldn’t really choose anything else huh?)

Spiced Apple Cupcakes with Maple Buttercream

These cupcakes come from Raspberri Cupcakes and represent everything that is hearty and good about apples!  I love the look of these deep brown cupcakes that on the inside have a dense moist look, almost like a muffin, but topped with delectable buttercream.

Find the recipe here.

St Patricks Day is just around the corner, and well although I am not Irish I am keen to celebrate for any reason at all.  Countries such as India fascinate me because every week there is a new celebration… but being Australian, I settle for the fact that we constantly seem to have some home grown festival to celebrate, and where there is a gap in the calendar, we look to our multicultural heritage.

So last week was National Women’s Day, and this week is St Patricks Day, and in trying to find the perfect cupcake to bake for our humble celebration at work on Thursday, I stumbled onto the Brown Eyed Baker, a website I often frequent, who has created her St Patty Cuppies which are called ‘Irish Car Bomb Cupcakes’.  But it is not just these fantastically boozy cupcakes she has, but a whole selection of St Patrick’s treats including beer waffles with cinnamon-caramel apples, guinness milk chocolate ice cream, Irish brown bread and more.

For me though, the cupcakes will be perfect!! Recipe can be found here!

There are a large number of blogs that I follow religiously because they offer such fantastic information, and one of those is Annie’s Eats.  It is not all about cupcakes, but then I need to eat other forms of food too (well.. sometimes!) and everything she features is brilliant!

But what I want to share today, is a cupcake that she recently featured and that I have tried and it really is… really good!  Plus it looks amazing!  This is the Hummingbird Cupcake!  No birds however are harmed in the creation of this baby!  It has loads of yummy things though like bananas, walnuts and coconut!  If Grandma is coming around, this is the cupcake to bake!  Best of all the full recipe is available here.

But you may want more than just a tasty cupcake recipe?  Well Annie’s Eats also goes one step further and tells you how to make those absolutely fabulous dried pineapple flowers to decorate them with here.  I have to make cupcakes next week for the school autumn fete (we are either six months behind or in front seasonally) so these are going to be a hit with the conservative patrons!  Of course I’ll whip out some whacky colored cupcakes with adorable kid inspired fondant toppers to get the younger crowd buying as well!

Happy Baking!

Cupcake Poop! (picture courtesy of the Cupcake Project)

I was a little confused when I saw the word “poop” titling a post with a picture of delicious looking crispy cookies.  But I guess everyone has their own terminology for the little bits of batter that end up on the edges of the cupcake pan and get cooked up into tasty crispy treats.

Cupcake Project gives us the scoop on the poop, or rather, how to bake it up on purpose rather than just relying on serendipitous accident:

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Taste of Home recently posted this yummy looking Chocolate Cookie Cake recipe. 

Ingredients

• 1 package (18-1/4 ounces) white cake mix
• 16 cream-filled chocolate sandwich cookies, coarsely crushed
• 1 package (3 ounces) Kraft Philadelphia® – Cream Cheese, softened
• 2 tablespoons milk
• 2 cups heavy whipping cream
• 3/4 cup confectioners’ sugar
• Additional cream-filled chocolate sandwich cookies

Directions

• Prepare cake batter according to package directions; stir in crushed cookies. Spoon into a greased and floured 10-in. fluted tube pan.
• Bake at 350° for 33-38 minutes or until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean. Cool for 10 minutes before removing from pan to a wire rack to cool completely.
• In a small bowl, beat cream cheese and milk until smooth. Beat in cream until mixture begins to thicken. Gradually add confectioners’ sugar; beat until stiff peaks form. Frost cake. Garnish with additional cookies. Refrigerate leftovers. Yield: 12 servings.

Most cake recipes can be easily modified to make cupcakes and Sassybellewares recently blogged about how she did this.  She called them Crazy Good Cupcakes so they are definitely worth a try!