Cupcake Cocktail Party!

I'd like to think that this pretty much sums up the evening:

Jeff and I hosted our first Cupcake Cocktail Party last week! I've been dying to bring this idea to life since March (I have the memory of an elephant!), and it finally came true. The basic idea is that everybody dresses up as if they were going to a normal cocktail party, but the cocktails are in the cupcakes. Genius, I know. But the best part is that I actually got people to participate in this. Not that booze and anything baked by me has ever turned anyone off in the past, but dressing up to eat cupcakes? Fantastic!I ended up making five kinds of cupcakes:

Blue Hawaiian: Coconut and blue curacao cake, pineapple filling, and rum frosting!

Lemon Drop: Lemon cake, lemon-vodka filling, and vodka frosting!

Shirley Temple: Lemon-lime cake, cherry filling, and lemon-lime frosting!

White Russian: Kahlua cake, vodka syrup, and Bailey's frosting!

Unfortunately, I didn't get any photos of anyone eating the Rum and Coke cupcakes, but the images of those eating them will forever be in my heart (or some sweet crap like that).

We even turned the coffee table into a giant cupcake holder!

There were about twenty of us, which was slightly unexpected, but so appreciated! Well, someone had to help me eat all one-hundred cupcakes... I promise, there will be another one of these at the end of July, so watch out! There will be five new cupcakes to try while in pretty clothes (unless I get lazy and decide to only make four) soon enough.
Thanks so much for everyone who attended, and for those that didn't make it, I'll snag you next time!

Citrus Obsession!

It all started in January when I baked some cookies to send to my friends in Hokkaido. The cookies required orange juice and orange, lemon and lime zest. Thank god I made too many to fit in the tin, because I had an addiction. I'm pretty sure that the amount of fruit bits made the cookies healthy, so there was absolutely no problem with polishing them off in a week.
I then had to make some cupcakes for my sister before she went back home to England. There was an over-abundance of Tazo Wild Sweet Orange tea (which you can't buy at Starbucks anymore, but it's available at Target), and I was suffering from insomnia. So while I drank a cup of tea, I created these beauties:

These cupcakes used a basic vanilla cupcake recipe, with some orange zest and five tea bags steeped in a cup of water for thirty minutes. So simple, somewhat healthy, and delicious!

Since making really yummy lemon-lavender tarts for my Valentine's dinner with Jeff (which included Gordon Ramsay's recipe for beef wellington), I fell in love with homemade lemon curd. So I made a batch for my parents' house! It ended up being so tart that everyone made lemon faces when we were testing it, and I felt most succesful. I decided that ridiculously sweet cupcakes would go best with the tangiest lemon curd in the world. I've also fallen in love with the flavor of almonds, regardless of the fact that I actually hate eating nuts (don't ask), so the cupcakes became super-almondy! I hid the lemon curd inside of the cupcakes to surprise everyone, and then made an almond and Earl Grey tea frosting to top it off. Again, all I had to do to add the tea flavoring was steep it in some milk for roughly half an hour. I even experimented with making the cupcakes cute by making a swirl of frosting on top :).
Best of all, I heard that I made some lemon curd fans from this obsession!

This post will be finished off with more attractive family photos:

The Diabetic Murderer!

But first, this is what happens when you make cupcakes for your mom's co-workers:

(Since these messages were written by Catholics, does that mean Dan Brown will discover this and write yet another book to be made into a stupid movie?)
Those ladies really know how to overfeed my ego!
Speaking of overfeeding, the cupcakes that I made ended up being "Double Cookie" cupcakes, which could possibly end a diabetic's life early. Oops. But at least they're a tasty way to go!
Originally, I was going to make Oreo cupcakes with an Oreo frosting (not at all healthier, but still...). I soon discovered that papa somehow managed to eat nearly every single Oreo in the house, leaving me with only six. He ate fourteen cookies in a day. Seriously, how does he do that? In a moment of genius, however, I noticed that we still had part of a bar of baking chocolate and said (not really), "Aha!" I decided to make the cupcake part taste like a chocolate chip cookie and use the rest of the Oreos in a frosting before papa could get to them as well. I think that the chopped up semi-sweet chocolate made them seem really homey, too. But I will warn you, using half self-raising flour and half cake flour might not be the smartest combination, seeing as the cupcakes didn't rise as much as I would've liked. But hey, I believe these two would disagree:

I heard that my cupcakes didn't actually kill anyone, so...

I Promised Alcohol...

This New Year's Eve ended up being a quiet evening at Jeff's with a glass of champagne, a couple of cupcakes, a midnight kiss and bonding with his new dog (Rudy is seriously the greatest dog in the entire world!!). Since Jeff picked up Rudy the Rhodesian Ridgeback on Friday morning, we weren't able to go out and watch other people get completely trashed. But I'm pretty sure that the 48hr bonding time was worth it because I haven't seen Rudy in a day and I think I'm going through withdrawal...
Anyway, my sister's best friend had brought over several mini bottles of champagne earlier in the week, so I was completely selfless and used my mini bottle for this recipe. What goes really well with champagne, apart from an edible hibiscus? Strawberries!

Since it's the end of the holidays and I'm still pretty nice, I thought I'd share my recipe with you!

Champagne Cupcakes
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup self-rising flour
3/4 cup sugar (use more or less depending on the sweetness of the champagne)
2 eggs
1 stick butter
1 cup champagne
Bake at 350 degrees for roughly 25 minutes.

Strawberry Frosting
4 cups powdered sugar
1 stick butter
1 tablespoon champagne
2 tablespoons pureed strawberries (opening a jar of jam should be easier than using a blender, though...)

If anyone needs proof of how tasty these were, here it is:

Happy Cupcaking!!

Christmas Cupcake Explosion!!

Thanks to the fact that I'm virtually unemployed and should probably just give in to the idea of being a house-Alanna*, I was relatively poor this Christmas. I basically had spent an entire paycheck from the last time I worked on my family and Jeff, but still had to figure out what to get for his family.

Thank god for my cupcaking abilities.

I decided to shove the Christmas spirit down people's throats in mini cupcake form. I had a plan figured out weeks in advance, as most effecient Germans often do, and executed it at the last minute (as Alannas always do). Knowing that I wouldn't have access to my parents' wonderful new oven on either Christmas Eve or Christmas day, I ended up taking over Jeff's tiny kitchen. he'll probably still be finding bits of candy from this adventure in July...

This is what my idea of Christmas is:

Peppermint with chocolate chips,

and chocolate with Godiva liquer and cherries.
I used ten entire candy canes in the peppermint and chocolate chip cupcakes, which magically gives you nice, freshly-brushed breath. And, of course, I had completely substituted the one cup of milk with Godiva chocolate liquer for the chocolate cupcakes. This might be why Jeff's family likes me so much.
As always, Jeff was my trusted sous chef (and by "sous chef," I mean taste-tester), and was prepared to make sure that everything was good enough for his family.

You seriously should've seen me; I was a cupcaking machine. The only time I wasn't doing something related to my project was when the last batch went into the oven. I spent those ten minutes doing my hair and makeup :).
But now that Christmas is over, I only have one more chance to make cupcakes this year! I'm not entirely sure what they'll be, but I'm positive that alcohol will be involved...
Here's to hoping I get more chances to bake next year!

* House-Alanna does not vacuum, however.

I Love Alcohol!

According to the show Food Detectives, alcohol actually doesn't completely cook out of food. And when you bake, about 75% of whatever you use remains. So, technically, if you were to eat a dozen alcohol-based cupcakes, you'd probably be drunk (or, in my case, maybe five...). So after learning this wonderful fact of life, what did I do?

I made cupcakes with Kahlua.Thank god it was a Hasher's birthday when I made them, because she gave me an obvious excuse to booze up her cupcakes, which sounds really dirty if you take this sentence out of context. I've always been a firm believer in tasting the products that I plan on using for my creations :>. That's why I'm also happy that the Mexican mart over the wall carries pre-made tiny bottles of White Russian Kahlua in a four-pack.

These cupcakes were super easy to make too, so they're perfect for anyone who wants both alcohol and cupcakes but doesn't feel like separating the two. All you have to do is replace the cup of milk with just a bit more than one mini bottle of kahlua. The frosting that I ended up making was a white chocolate buttercream with, of course, another splash of White Russian Kahlua! Fortunately for me, one was saved so that I could actually eat a cupcake after I was done with work. And guess what? It was damn delicious.

Cardamom!

I've had strange ideas for cupcakes in the past- for example, a red wine cupcake that smelled like pizza. But ever since watching Cupcake Wars, I seriously started craving cardamom. There was an episode in which someone (I was jet-lagged after coming back from England, so I was half asleep and barely remember anything that night) used cardamom in the frosting. That sounded really weird... weird enough for me to remember from over a month ago. As always, I asked my boyfriend if I should experiment with cardamom, or play it safe with horchata cupcakes. All he said was, "Yes!"
I decided on making chai cupcakes with a cardamom buttercream to feed my fellow performers in Short Bus Comics backstage during our Thursday night show. (I completely forgot to take photos right when they were done, so I ended up using my phone backstage...)


Chai cupcakes
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup self-raising flour
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup chai powder
1/8 tsp ground cardamom
1/8 tsp cinnamon
2 eggs
1 stick butter
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/4 cups milk

Preheat your oven to 350F and prepare your cupcake trays!
Cream the butter and sugar together, until it becomes smooth and creamy. Whisk in one egg at a time, and then the vanilla. In a seperate bowl, sift together the two flours. Add half to the wetter of the two mixtures, plus half of the milk. Add the rest of the flour and milk, and whisk until smooth. Throw in the chai, cardamom and cinnamon and whisk again.
Pop the cupcake trays (I'm assuming you've already put the batter into the cupcake trays at this point) into the oven for 25-27 minutes. Once they've got a slightly golden color on top, take the cupcakes out of the oven and let them cool for roughly 20 minutes (if you're in a hurry like I usually am and half a tiny fan, bring it into the kitchen and use it to cool the cupcakes in almost half the time).

Cardamom frosting
3 cups powdered sugar
1 stick butter
2 tsp vanilla extract
1-2 tsp ground cardamom, depending on your tastebuds
just under 1/4 cup milk

Cream together half of the sugar and the butter, and add in the vanilla. Pour in the milk and the rest of the sugar and whisk until the mixture is smooth. Put in the cardamom, 1/2 tsp at a time, until you're satisfied with the flavor. I personally prefer 2 tsp, because the frosting is neither too sweet nor too cardamomy.
Add the frosting to the cupcakes (I feel like I'm almost typing down to you by saying this, but when we order a hot coffee, the cups warn us that the contents may be hot, so...) with a butterknife by taking a dollop and spreading it counter-clockwise until you're satisfied with the amount of frosting.

Hopefully you'll all enjoy these strange cupcakes! Expect many more to come!