SUNFLOWER SUGAR COOKIES FOR WEDDING!

Here is the final product of the sunflower cookies I made for Amanda and Andrews wedding! It took 3 batches of cookies, 2 batches of royal icing and 2 boxes of oreo cookies to get this look! The bride and groom as well as 2 bridesmaids came out to help with the decorating  the week before the wedding and the help was very much appreciated! You'd be surprised how many cookies you can decorate in 3 hours with the extra hands! The cookies turned out great! And there were even a few people scouring the tables at the end of the night because they wanted the cookies that people forgot on the tables for themselves! Haha! The wedding was a blast! Beautiful day! Gorgeous Bride! Awesome venue! Seriously, awesome venue! I'd totally get married there! Amaaazing meal!! Mmmm I am still drooling over the chicken and the sauce on it! I want to know what the sauce was so bad! And the cupcakes! The vanilla ones were to die for!!! It was a great day and I actually managed not to cry when teh bride walked down t he aisle!! Trust me it was hard! I think the half bottle of wine that I hade before helped me, and the fact that I couldn't stop taking pictures!!

Bridal Shower Cupcakes for a Bride-To-Be at Work

Wilton Basic Decorating Classes

So for the month of August every Wednesday I took a 2 hour long Decorating Basics class at Michael's. Unfortunately, I already had a general idea of how to do most of the things we were doing in the classes, however, it was mandatory to take this class before I could take any of the other classes that Michael's offers. The one I really wanted to take was the Gum Paste and Fondant Course! I haven't used gum paste yet and I am anxious to learn and get tips! I have little experience with fondant so I defintely want to learn more as well! Especially techniques for rolling the fondant because I find that to be somewhat annoying. Back to Decorating Basics, I actually learned quite a few things from this class so it was definitely worth it for me! I learned how to do several different kinds of flowers; roses, shaggy mums, drop flowers, the shell shape etc! Pretty cool! The very last class which was last night, we got to decorate our cakes and I tried to use each flower that we learned throughout the course...thus making my cake not so pretty which is why I will not post any pictures haha but for me it was just more practice for the flowers.

So I signed up for the Gum Paste and Fondant Course and it starts next Wednesday! I am very excited and I will try to take pictures of everything that I make (since this time around everything I make will be coming home with me unlike the Basics Course where everything got scooped back into the containers!).

Wish me luck!

Amanda's Bachelorette Cake!

This was my first time ever using fondant on a cake, well really it was pretty much my first time making a "shaped cake" but you know, even I have to admit, I was pretty impressed with how this cake turned out! Such a cool cake! Seriously! I made this for my friend Amanda's Bachelorette in August and it was awesome!! So I wanted to do something different because one of the most common bachelorette cakes is a 'pecker' cake (I'm sure most will know what I mean by that) and so I started researching! I found a picture of a male torso cake and thought it was the coolest thing and I had to try it! Very happy with this cake!

Pink Lemonade Cupcakes for girl's night!!!

So all the boys were off on a Bachelor Party weekend and all the ladies decided to get together and do a sort of potluck thing! I brought these! They were friggen delicious!!!! Especially the pink lemonade icing as well! I found this awesome recipe online one day just browsing, which included the recipe for the icing and I just had to try it!! I added some pink lemonade concentrate to the boxed cupcake mix I had used and then made the icing with some more lemonade concentrate in that as well. Then I made candied lemons to add to the top of the icing for a garnish! Unfortunately I cut some of the lemons too thick so they look a little funny but that's alright, learning from my mistakes! Either way, soooo yummy! They were a perfect little summer treat that I will absolutely make again!

 The cupcakes before the candied lemon garnish.

A close up.

Cupcakes with the candied lemon garnish!

Formula One(F1) and Spaghetti&Meatballs Cupcakes for my step-dad's birthday!!

So my step-dad turned the big 5-O this year and my mom threw him a mini-party with family and so I made him 2 of his favorite things. Spaghetti and Meatballs and Formula One, only in the form of cupcakes!!! These were so much fun to make and my little brother helped by making the "spaghetti". I think he was more interested in eating the icing but i kept my eye on him!

Canada Day 2011 Cupcakes!!

Cupcakes I made for Canada Day! I just changed up how I iced each cupcake, the ones with the canadian flag on them are just candy chocolate melts. I also learned my lesson with using the Christmas Red gel paste coloring...when used in alrge quantities it leaves a bitter taste! Not the end of the world. Needless to say, I now know to use 'No Taste' Red gel paste coloring haha.

Here's all of them!

This one was my favorite, I just put white icing on one side of the decorating bag and the red on the other to give this cool swirl effect! Love it!

SNEAK PEAK AT SPAGHETTI AND MEATBALLS CUPCAKES

SNEAK PEAK AT FORMULA ONE CUPCAKES

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