Rainbows!

Just how FANTASTIC are these? I stumbled upon these Rainbow Cupcakes today and I want so badly to make them because they look like so much fun! The youngest in my family is 19 (with the exception of my newborn cousin, Brett) and I think they'd be perfect to make with/for kids, but oh well. I guess I'll just have to make them for my own amusement :D


They'd probably look great in pastel blues and pinks for Easter...I think I just figured out what I'll be bringing for Easter dinner!

This was my first attempt at making red velvet (and also my first experience eating it!). It seemed to be so popular I figured I should finally try it myself and see what all the fuss was about.

Although it was quite tasty, I really don't think it lived up to the hype. To me it just tasted like a barely-chocolate-chocolate cake, plus all the red food coloring kind of put me off. I think next time I'm going to use the juice from muddled raspberries for colour (and flavor obviously!). I mean, how delicious is raspberry and chocolate together? Plus this way they're made with nothing artificial, which is what I want the core of TC to be.

Regardless, the cake was really moist and still had a lot of flavor. I topped off the little cakes with cinnamon cream cheese icing.
Thanks to Bakerella for the recipe!

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! ♥

Some REALLY Exciting News!

I have my first order! YAY!

It's for 3 dozen with a "do whatever you please" attached to it. I'm thinking of going all out and making 6 different kinds so people can get a little taste of a lot of flavors.

Well I have my day planned for tomorrow! I'm pumped! You bet I'll be documenting it all so keep your eyes peeled over the next week for all the tasty little treats I'm going to be pumping out.

Now off to the grocery store!...

Oh Yeah!

Some fairly exciting news! I have an official website now.
Something else for everyone to poke through if they're bored :)

---> Teensy Cakes <---

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.

French Breakfast Muffins

I made a post about said muffins a few days ago, and decided to make them for breakfast today.

They are just as delicious as Ann said they would be; moist and melt-in-your-mouth. I'm sure they'd be even better if they weren't about |that much| overbaked. Oh well, serves me right for getting distracted, haha.

They don't look quite as pretty as Velvet Lava's, but they're still awfully tasty! I will certainly be making these again, so next time I'll be sure to keep my eye on them!

Surprise!

My most recent experiment was originally going to be a vanilla cupcake with a chocolate chip cookie base, which, to my demise, wasn't possible since I had run out of brown sugar (and the store had already closed!) "Oh well," I thought, "what else can I stuff into a cupcake?"

Brownies.

What a wonderful little surprise concealed by a tasty layer of vanilla cake, hidden underneath a billow of icing (pink icing at that!)

These were fun, and surprisingly easy to make!

First I made the cake batter and brownie batter.
I then filled each cup half full with cake batter.












After baking them at 325°F for about 5 minutes I put a dollop of brownie batter in the centre of each cup. Pre-baking allows the outside of the cake to firm up just enough to keep the brownie batter from sinking to the bottom. Back in the oven they went!








Fast forward about 15 minutes.
The brownie puffed up a bit more than I was expecting, so now I know for next time to use less baking powder, or save a little cake batter and top off the centres after the brownie dollop.










Topped with a pretty little swirl of pink buttercream, the finished product looks like just a plain vanilla cupcake, right? But then...











...Surprise!
What could be better than finding a second delicious treat inside an already delicious one?!

What to try next?...

I've been stockpiling recipes for ages and all I can think of is how I wish I had a bigger oven and more time in the day just so I could make them all at once and gorge myself on deliciousness.

These Apple Pie Cupcakes just look divine. I, of course, would probably tweak the recipe a bit and throw some cinnamon and fresh-grated nutmeg into the cupcake batter, but that's just me (if I could live off cinnamon I would).

I made these little darlings for Valentines Day and brought them into work for everyone to nibble on throughout the shift, only I rolled them out and used a heart shaped cookie cutter to cut them up. I'm not a huge shortbread fan, but add a little espresso and some chocolate chips to the batter and damn is it tasty. Next time I think I'll use a little extra butter to soften them up and make them extra melt-in-your-mouth, but everyone who had them said they were perfect as is.
A quick tip with this recipe? I rolled the dough between two pieces of wax paper and layed it flat in the freezer for less than 10 minutes (instead of leaving it in the fridge for hours). The dough was perfectly chilled and ready to be cut up without sticking to anything or ripping.

I've been dying to make these French Breakfast Muffins for weeks. Rumor has it that these muffins melt in your mouth, and almost taste like a doughnut.
Really? A doughnut? All the tastiness without the deep frying? I'm in. Plus they're rolled in cinnamon sugar....did I mention how much I love cinnamon? *drool*

These Gingerbread Cupcakes would have been perfect for the holidays. Imagine a spicy little warm-from-the-oven cupcake making those -40°C winter nights seem to dissolve away. What a comforting thought. Well I'll use the excuse that there's still snow on the ground, and even though it's not -40°C anymore, it's still cold enough!

The perfect late-summer/fall treat? Maple Carrot Cupcakes. I love carrot cake, especially when it's really moist and just falls apart at the site of a fork, so the thought of adding a bunch of really rich maple syrup to the blend sounds amazing. Maybe it's the Canadian in me, maybe it's that I have an insatiable sweet tooth and would jump at any opportunity to smother something in syrup, but whatever it is, I can't wait to mix these two flavors together, with a dollop of cream cheese icing on top, of course, and devour them.

Nutella Coffe Frosting I imagine would be delicious on any cupcake you could make. I'm not a HUGE fan of nutella like some people I know, but having it in subtle amounts I must say is uber yum.

I also want to work on finding/adapting a recipe to make a peanut butter cupcake (chocolate chips most likely included).

I WILL be making all of this eventually, and I promise to share the success (or fail) of these recipes and just how tasty (or icky) they are.

Welcome!

Hi there! and welcome to Teensy Cakes!

My name is Kaitlynd, and through this blog I will outlet my creative cupcaking energy.

I'm 24, from Winnipeg, Manitoba and work as a bartender at a friendly little french bistro in the evenings. I'll be heading back to school in the fall to study science with a focus on microbiology; essentially I'm a big science nerd with a crazy passion for baking, especially cupcakes. I've always said that my backup plan was to become a pastry chef, but for now I'll work on making my little creations on the weekends and having my kitchen colleagues (and of course, boyfriend) critique my work.

Short term goals? Buy lots of books and learn new techniques. Try new recipes and make my own. Get my name out there and supply a few people and events with my miniature concoctions.
Long term goals? Get my business off the ground and make a career out of baking. Maybe become infamous and supply the world with cupcakes. Who knows, but one can dream :)

Anyways, follow along with me as I try new recipes, with success and fail, take inspiration from fellow bloggers and bakers, and maybe even begin a business. This is the start of my journey and who knows where I may end up!