Busy Busy!

Orders out the wazoo! 3 this week! Things are starting to move :D

The first was for 6 for a friend's, friend's birthday. Chocolate with orange cream cheese and chocolate cherry filled with Godiva white chocolate liqueur buttercream; apparently a delicious success.

The second was for 2 dozen miniatures for a wonderful lady. She lives in the same building as the restaurant I work in and it was her birthday today. I sort of half worked her party in the wine bar (I bartend), but was sent home early since the other bartender was also working incase things got crazy. After being sweetly invited to join them for a drink, I sat down and enjoyed a beer.


Her order included chocolate with strawberry buttercream, all natural red velvet with cream cheese icing, coconut with lime buttercream and lemon with blueberry cream cheese icing. I had a lot of fun with this order!

Now the third is for Saturday, which I believe is for a first anniversary. My services were enlisted after a local bakery that just opened up disappointed her by some expensive, not-so-special cupcakes for her last party. I'm going to do my best to wow her with some fancy little concoctions for a much cheaper price.

I'm LOVING the direction things are going in! I also have another order for a wedding shower in August, including cookies, a cheesecake and maybe a pie. YUMMY!

Best. Job. Ever.

My First Order!

I just dropped off my first order!
It was for 3 dozen, so I made 6 different kinds:

Vanilla Brownie Surprise! with Buttercream


Lemon with Blackberry Cream Cheese


Cinnamon with Nutella Buttercream


Chocolate Cherry-Filled Cinnamon Cream Cheese


Coconut with Raspberry Buttercream


Carrot with Cream Cheese


The best part was that I made about a dozen extras (for my boyfriend and I to nibble on, of course), and after covering them with cling wrap leaving them on the dining room table, we went to bed. Around 3am, I heard one of the cats playing with what I thought was a ball of paper, no biggie. Well he kept coming closer, and eventually jumped on the bed and dropped what he had on my leg. I thought to myself, "jeeze that's a lot heavier than a piece of pap...no...it can't be!" So I reached down and got a handful of icing and cupcake! The little bugger daintily unwrapped the tray (how I have NO idea), stole a cupcake from the corner and I swear to god started to pull off the liner to eat it. He even brought it to bed!!!
I take it as a compliment; my cupcakes are loved by even cats! ♥

It's Not Banana Bread

"What distinguishes a muffin from a cupcake?" is what I was asked when I presented these banana cupcakes to my co-workers yesterday.
My answer? The density, moistness, the amount of sugar added, and of course, "a muffin doesn't have icing...duh!"

Well after that, I gained the assumption that since everyone is so accustomed to eating banana bread, regardless the treat, it made people believe they were eating a muffin as opposed to a cupcake. Oh well!

Anyways, back on track here.
These were about as easy as it gets. I snared the recipe from Martha Stewart, but tweaked the recipe slightly; the icing, quite a bit.
I doubled the recipe and used only 1/2 the amount of banana and only 1 cup of sugar as opposed to the 1-1/2 cups it called for. To balance out the moisture and acidity the bananas would have imparted I added about 2 tablespoons of buttermilk to the mix.

For the icing, I used the basic recipe on the site, but added another 1/4 cup of confectioners sugar and mixed in 1 tablespoon of honey, approximately 1/2 teaspoon of fresh grated ginger and about 1 tablespoon of lemon juice (if I had actual lemons on hand I would have used lemon zest instead). I used the cinnamon I would have mixed in the icing to instead dust the tops of the cupcakes after the icing was freshly piped.

Well they were just about as tasty as they look. I was able to get 18 regular-sized cupcakes and 24 miniature-sized cupcakes out of the doubled batch.