Sunflower Sugar Cookies!

So these I made a test/trial run for a friends wedding coming up in September! She asked me if I would mimnd making her and her fiance's favors and of course I said yes! What an honor! So I wanted to do a test run and make a whole bunch of different varieties for them to choose from! Right now I only have 3 pictures of the one that I will be making for their wedding, the rest will be posted later on when I get them uploaded on my computer! The pictures below are of the ones that most resembled a sunflower and also were pretty easy to make! Making all of these sugar cookies and decorating them took me 2 days. The royal icing was cool to work with and like anything else, I made my mistakes too! when I made the royal icing, I followed the directions to a tee! And I got the point where the recipe said that it would form thick glossy peaks and I stopped to read on. I read that I needed to add more water to get the icing more runny so that I could flood the cookies after I outlined them...in this whole process I forgot that I would need thicker icing to do an outline and also really needed a bag of the thick glossy peaks to make the leaf shapes on the cookies that were chosen for the wedding! And of course I had also run out of icing sugar so when I need to thicken the icing for the leafs I had to wait until the next day! Oh well. Lesson learned! And at least when I made the big batch, I don't have to go any further past the thick glossy peaks part!! Woo! So here's the 3 pictures I have for now and I'll post more later!

Petits Fours!

This is the 4th set of cupcakes I've made so far! I made these in May for one of my girlfriends Bridal Shower that i threw for her. These were so easy to make! And super cute!!! The only problem was that I heated up the icing too much so they melted off the sides, however in this only picture that I have of them, they look kind of cool! Next time I will make sure I don't heat it up too much so nothing melts haha! in the picture you can see 3 cupcakes that turned out perfect and didn't melt at all (2 green ones and a blue one), that's because they were the first ones I had made in that batch of color. So not all of them melted and looked like crap which was good!! These are a great bridal or baby shower treat!

Monarchs

These are the 3rd set of cupcakes I have made called Monarchs! I think these are part of the reason I bought the books because they looked amazing and so realistic..for a book of course! I made these in April for Matt's mom's birthday. This was definitely a learning experience! I had to be super quick when outlining the butterfly wings and then flooding the inside with color! And after I had flooded it, I still had to be really fast to use the toothpick to drag the brown into the orange!! The icing dried very quick so the first few I made were not keepers!! Once I got the hang of it though they started to turn out ok! I forgot to add the white nonpareils though around the tops of the wings but that's just something I'll make sure I remember next time I make them which I definitely plan to do!! These were very fun to make and one of my favorites so far!

RUBBER DUCKIES

These are the 2nd set of cupcakes I made called Rubber Duckies. They are adorable and I made them for my brothers 11th birthday in February! These proved to be more difficult than March of the Penguins only when it came to dipping because the Timbit was off to the side and some of them would slide down a bit while drying! Other than that, they were really cute and fun to make!! The beaks were made from Straburst that i heated up and molded into the rounded shape and the eyes were chocolate chips that I made sure to put the pointed end into the icing this time haha. They were a hit!

 The tails were marshmallows that were sliced on the diagonal! Genius!

March of the Penguins!

Ok, so here are the very first cupcakes I made from the Hello, Cupcake! book. They were my absolute favorite cupcakes when I looked through the book and my birthday was coming up so I decided I'd make them...for myself haha. I had help from my wonderful boyfriend, who cut up all the Starburst pieces into feet and beaks. He even made the lead Penguin a little birthday party hat, it was very cute and sweet of him:P So I found getting the icing around the timbit and donut hole to hold them together before dipping them in the heated up icing a little difficult, but it was also my first time doing anything like that. I slowly got the hang of it, but it's something I still need to practice! Once they were finished I started on the ice bucket and the icebergs, they obviously were very easy. When I finished I was pretty proud of the work we'd done and for the first go at it, they turned out alright!!

Lessons learned and tips for next time: 1) Use less icing between the cupcake and the donut and push then down as close to the cupcake as possible, that will make them look much better next time after dipping them. 2) If going to use mini chocolate chips for the eyes, do not put the flat part of the chip on the icing that is on the timbit. Stick the pointed part into the icing, that will make it much easier to put the dotted eye on the chip afterwards. Another thing would be to just use mini M&Ms like the book calls for, but I couldn't find any at the time so I found something else that worked. 3) Heating up the Starburst just a little bit, will make them easier to mold 4) the dipping part was easy, but I used a big glass measuring cup, so once it got closer to the bottom of the glass, it was very hard to dip and using a spoon to pouring it over them just made some weird lines, but again, that's something I need to practice. But next time I would maybe just add more icing.

 Catch of the day!!! The licorice under the penguins arm attached to the ice bucket!

WELCOME TO MY BAKING BLOG!!

Hello all!

I've recently become fascinated with making cupcakes! I bought these 2 amazing cupcake books by Karen Tack and Alan Richardson. I'm sure some or most of you may have heard of them, they are: Hello Cupcake! and What's New, Cupcake? I can't wait for them to make a 3rd book because I'm dying to see what they've prepared for their fans next! Anyways, this blog is just for me to post pictures of the cupcakes I make, whether they are from those books or not and to comment on the easiness or any possible difficulties I may have had in the process of making them. Now, the title says both cupcakes and cookies…you won’t see too many cookies on here as I don’t make them very often because I don’t really like eating them, however that doesn’t stop me from making them every so often. I am a cupcake lover, not a cookie lover, sorry!! That is all! First few pictures and details about cupcakes I’ve already made are soon to follow!

I hope you enjoy!

-KE