Cupcakes!

Hello!

     If you have noticed, I love to cook. I love to bake, and I love sharing my ideas and findings with whoever I can reach out too. What a better way to do this than to blog about it! It will forever be here, available for reference. Though I am not a master in any way, I can at least share the mistakes I have made in order to help you better yourself. 

     

     This week, I made cupcakes. It was for a coworkers birthday (which was actually in June, but we were all so busy that we only had time to eat and sleep). So I decided to get them made for all to enjoy. 

     While I usually pride myself on making things from scratch because honestly, it tastes better that way, cake mixes are the one thing that I find so much easier to make from a box (especially if it's just for a coworker and not like a wedding cake). That being said, I have always used the Pillsbury boxed cake mix, that you can usually find on sale for 10/$10, or something like that. In this case, I used a yellow cake mix, as that was what was requested for the birthday boy in particular. 

     I usually end up tweaking the directions on the box to make it a little more moist and delicious. Its always been a family thing to add a heaping dollop of mayonnaise to our boxed cake mixes (and even from scratch recipes too!). It helps the cake to keep its moisture. It was a trick my great-grandmother used, and she made wedding cakes! So with that, follow the rest of the directions on the box to make the cupcakes. 

    Now comes the part I have always struggled with. When I was younger, I loved the idea of decorating cakes and cupcakes with those elaborate designs and roses and flowers. However, whenever I tried to do it myself, either the frosting was not stiff enough or my hand wasn't steady enough. I didn't figure this out until I got older (and Pinterest came around lol) and researched what the issues where. I found a wonderful recipe for a buttercream frosting that comes out almost perfect every time. Here is the recipe for that. 

     Now comes for the coloring. I love making frosting different colors and adding something festive to my baked good. I typically use your regular liquid food coloring in the red, blue, yellow, and green colors, although I buy them in larger bottles from an Amish store. To figure out what the ratio of drops I will need for whatever I am doing, I refer to some old magazine pages that I ripped out one day. They were from Martha Stewart and it was a whole chart of the number of drops you need to make a multitude of colors! Here is a link to the online version to see for yourself!

    The next step in decorating is frosting the cupcakes and making it look pretty, which can be the biggest struggle. Previously, I had purchased a kit from Wilton that had a bunch of different tips, couplers, and piping bags. I recently figured out that for cupcakes, all of those tips were way too small for cupcakes. You need to purchase the extra large tips for cupcake frosting and after that everything will go smoothly and you will have some great looking cupcakes with very little effort. This a photo of the cupcakes I made and how great they turned out with the large frosting tips and a beautiful mint green frosting.

     I hope you enjoy making your own! They are truly a wonderful invention and very handy to eat!

Much Love,

Taylor