Marshmallow Moments Cupcakes!

Happy Thursday, my friends!

This week I’m finally picking up on a few things I need to do despite all the work crazy going on.  Plus, today is supposedly the last day of the work week.  “Supposed” because I might have to go in to work and I believe, everyone at the office will be there also.  Either way, yesterday night, I needed to relax and after postponing actual baking for at least a few weeks, at somewhere near midnight, I decided I was not going to do it anymore and decided to improvise some cupcakes.

These Marshmallow Delight cupcakes didn’t turn out quite as pretty as I had envisioned in my head, but I think I have a way to remedy it if ever I make a second batch. Look at them, they aren’t too ugly, right?

Right out of the oven!

In case you wondered how I got the name, Marshmallow Moments is for the name of cereal I used from Sally’s Cereals.  They sell it at Walmart here in Canada (not sure about elsewhere). You could probably use Lucky Charms and it would have the same effect 🙂

How did I do these, you ask? Its actually extremely simple.

I used the recipe for Yellow Cupcakes in Betty Crocker’s The Big Book of Cupcakes and then before putting the batter in the oven, I sprinkled and nested the cereal as I liked on the top so that it would be combined together when it baked a look like little marshmallow (cereal) treasure on the top.

Here’s the recipe for Yellow Cupcakes:

Yellow Cupcakes

makes 24 cupcakes (I halved everything to make 12 instead)

2 1/3 cups all-purpose flour

2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup butter or margarine, softened

1 1/4 cups sugar

3 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla

2/3 cup milk

Directions:

1. Heat oven to 350F.  Place paper baking cups in each of 24 regular-size muffin cups.  Grease and flour muffin cups or spray with baking spray with flour

2. In medium bowl, mix flour, baking powder and salt; set aside

3. In large bowl, beat butter with electric mixer on medium speed 30 seconds.  Gradually add sugar, about 1/4 cup at a time, beating well after each addition and scraping bowl occassionally.  Beat 2 minutes longer.  Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition.  Beat in vanilla.  On low speed, alternately add flour mixture, about 1/3 of mixture at  a time, and milk, about 1/2 mixture at  a time, beating just until blended.

4. Divide batter evenly among muffin cups, filling each about 2/3 full.

5. Bake 20 to 25 minutes or until golden brown and toothpick inserted in center comes out clean.  Cool in pans 5 minutes.  Remove cupcakes from pans; place on cooling racks to cool.

As usual, there are a few changes to this recipe.  While halving everything to get 12, I used 2 eggs (since 1.5 is a bit hard to achieve) and the normal amount of vanilla since it wouldn’t make a huge difference.  I also replaced the milk with almond milk (due to my lactose intolerance).  Thats all for the modifications on this one.

These cupcakes may have turned out to be a bit deformed looking.  Its only because I believe if I kept them in for 20 instead of the full 25, the marshmallows might not have melted quite so much and it would look better. As I was monitoring it, it was looking so pretty, except that if I were to make it again, I would stuff the cereal in the batter even more abundantly so it would look like a mountain of treasure hiding in the cupcake.

Aside its flawed appearance, this cupcake is really good.  The taste was well balanced and if you want less sweet, just decrease the sugar a tad because the cereal is already sugary.  I didn’t really mind because the taste was like biting into a crunchy layer on the top and then into the fluffiness of the cupcakes and I love the contrast of that feeling as I chew 🙂

“Long” weekend is coming up so be prepared, I have more baking adventures planned with a bit of an Easter theme hopefully!

What do think of this Marshmallow Moments cupcake?

Mini Crumb Cakes!

Good news is that that I finally managed to find time to bake! YAY!  I was planning on keeping it Halloween or fall-themed at the very least.  It was running a bit late so this small and quick recipe for Mini Crumb Cakes seemed like the logical choice.  Plus, it doesn’t make too many, meaning I can get around to a more appropriate and fancy recipe this weekend 🙂

Lets take a look at those Mini Crumb Cakes, shall we?

Mini Crumb Cakes

I got this recipe from my relatively newer cookbook Betty Crocker The Big Book of Cupcakes.  Its super simple and takes about 10 minutes to put together and another 30 minutes in the oven. A quick fresh out of the oven snack if you ever feel like having something sweet.

Makes 6 mini cakes

Ingredients

1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 cup packed brown sugar

1/2 cup butter (or margarine), softened

1 egg, beaten

1/4 cup milk

1 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

1 tbsp powdered sugar

Fresh out of the oven!

How to Make it:

1) Heat oven to 350F. Place paper baking cup in each of 6 regular size muffin cups.  In a large bowl, stir together flour, brown sugar and butter with spoon until crumbly. Reserve 1/3 cup mixture for topping.

2) Stir egg, milk, baking powder and cinnamon into remaining crumbly mixture until well mixed.  Divide batter evenly among muffin cups.  Sprinkle reserved crumbly mixture over batter

3) Bake 20 to 30 minutes or until toothpick inserted in center of cake comes out clean.  Cool 5 minutes.  Remove cakes from pan; place on cooling rack.  Before serving, sprinkle warm cakes with powdered sugar.  Serve warm or cooled.

 

These turned out to be really awesome.  It smelled amazing and it was super easy to make.  Also, the texture was very good especially with the streusel-like topping.  Its like a coffee cake streusel cupcake.  There wasn’t need for many modifications.  I did replace the milk with almond milk.  Also, I couldn’t find my powdered sugar so I didn’t sprinkle any extra sugar on the top.  It was already sweet enough for me, so I don’t really think its necessary.

Inside the Mini Crumb Cake

I had a tasting even though it was really late at night.  The texture was moist and mixed with the texture of the initial bite of the streusel topping, it had gave it a little crunch as well.  Very awesome recipe! You should try it out.  It does only make 6 mini cakes so you might want to double the recipe accordingly if you plan on making it for more company.

Happy Tuesday everyone! 🙂

 

 

Snickerdoodle Cupcakes!

After talking about it for 2 weeks, I finally opened up my new cookbook and got back into the baking world 🙂 Suffice to say, it was a very pleasant and relaxing experience for me. Man, did I miss it so much! After flipping through The Big Book of Cupcakes, I chose to do the Snickerdoodle Cupcakes! If you haven’t seen or tasted Snickerdoodles, you can head on right over HERE to check out the ones I made and the recipe if you’d like to try it out because they have heavenly!

Snickerdoodle cupcakes

The recipe is from Betty Crocker’s The Big Book of Cupcakes!

Makes 24 cupcakes

 

Ingredients

Cupcakes:

2 3/4 cups all purpose flour

3 tsps baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

1 tsp ground cinnamon

3/4 cup shortening or butter

1 2/3 cups sugar

5 egg whites

2 1/2 tsps vanilla

1 1/4 cups milk

Cinnamon Frosting:

6 cups powdered sugar

2 tsps ground cinnamon

2/3 cup butter or margarine, softened

1 tbsp vanilla

2-4 tbsps milk

Topping:

2 tsps granulated sugar

1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

Snickerdoodle Cupcakes

1) Heat oven to 350F.  Place paper baking cups in each of the regular-sized muffin cups.

2) In medium bowl, mix flour, baking powder, salt and cinnamon; set aside

3) In large bowl, beat shortening with electric mixer on medium speed 30 seconds. Gradually add sugar, about 1/3 cup at a time, beating well after each addition and scraping bowl occasionally.  Beat 2 minutes longer.  Add egg whites, one at a time, beating well after each addition.  Beat in vanilla.  On low speed, alternately add flour mixture, about 1/3 of mixture at a time, and milk, about 1/2 at a time, beating just until blended.

4) Divide batter evenly among muffin cups, filling each about 2/3 full.

5) Bake 18 to 20 minutes.  Cool in pans 5 minutes.  Remove cupcakes from pans; place on cooling racks to cool.

6) Meanwhile, in a large bowl, mix powdered sugar, 2 tsp cinnamon and butter with electric mixer on low speed.  Stir in vanilla and 2 tbsp of milk.  Gradually beat in enough remaining milk, 2 tsp at a time, to make frosting smooth and spreadable.

7) Frost cupcakes.  In small bowl, mix topping ingredients; sprinkle over frosted cupcakes.

My modifications from the original recipe above! For starters, my cupcake was just a white cupcake, because of the setup of the book, I totally forgot I had to add in cinnamon.  Silly and forgetful, I know! I used shortening instead of butter and milk was replaced with unsweetened vanilla-flavored almond milk.  This helped as I ran out of vanilla during this recipe. For the frosting, I used butter and also decreased to 4 cups powdered sugar as I know it always is way too sweet (for me).  Also, I used 3 tbsp of milk approximately to make the frosting a nice texture.

 

The result was great! The frosting was a perfect sweetness balanced with the delicious and fluffy white cupcake.  The snickerdoodle taste was definitely there.  It was relatively easy to make.  I did have to make two different batches.  However, it was definitely worth it! Smelled awesome and tasted delicious!

I promise I’m back with more baking, k? Just needed to get back in the groove 😉 I already have my next dessert figured out! 🙂

Hamburger Cupcakes!

My Father’s Day baking project this year was Hamburger Cupcakes!

Summer is around the corner and my boyfriend and his dad love the grill.  Last week, when my best friend brought this up to me, I knew I had to try it 🙂

Hamburger cupcakes!

To find the original recipe, please follow this link: http://www.bakerella.com/fast-food-fun/

Prepare for these to take a good amount of time to make however, they are composed of the simplest form of baking as in using baking mixes.  I haven’t used mixes in a long time but seeing as I had an afternoon to prepare for it, I felt it was the best choice.  I used Duncan Hines baking mixes for the moist yellow cake and fudge brownies.  The original chose Betty Crocker and Pillsbury instead.  I don’t have those available here so I used what I could find and improvised 🙂

Hamburger cupcakes inside

The hardest part was making the right color icing and decorating it.  This was possibly the best control I’ve had and it still looks a bit weird.  But, when you put the top on it, aside from having very pastel colored condiments, they do look quite like burgers, right?

I ended up making 12 Hamburger Cupcakes and a piles of “fries” from sugar cookies.  I somehow forgot to take pictures of them.  I used the President’s Choice Sugar Cookie mix.  They are quite delicious 🙂 It would make for the whole Happy Meal concept but dessert style!

I had 24 cupcakes so guess what I did with the rest? I used the remaining icing (which I used as they recommended Duncan Hines Home-style Creamy Vanilla Icing) and decorated some cupcakes!

I was pretty happy with the results and everyone loved it! It seems to be a very creative and sweet hit. 🙂

Its an awesome hit! If you get the chance, maybe you can whip it up for a barbecue party or next year’s Father’s day? Whatever you want, this is just so fun to make.  Time-consuming but very fun! 🙂

Happy Monday everyone! 🙂

Banana Cupcakes with Honey Cinnamon Frosting

Friday FINALLY came around after this crazy week.  This week, the star of this week’s recipe has to my overripe bananas sitting (or that were sitting) on my counter top.  Mom’s orders, can’t really ignore them even if I’m 26.  HAHA! I haven’t done cupcakes since October. Man, that’s a long time, no? If you missed those, you can check out my Glow in the Dark Cupcakes right HERE.  (<–These were a huge hit and super cute.)  Honestly, I got scared of doing the frosting, but its okay the frosting for the ones I did last night was easier.  And I need to empty my mind after a long week, so lets go!

The recipe is from Martha Stewart‘s site.  Here’s the link: http://www.marthastewart.com/314063/banana-cupcakes-with-honey-cinnamon-fros

Just remember that the Honey Cinnamon Frosting is a separate recipe that is linked to that page.  If you want to know just how to make that, you can get it right here at this link: http://www.marthastewart.com/336911/honey-cinnamon-frosting

This is the whole deal with frosting and all. They give you the option of garnishing the banana right before serving but that would mean I would have to devour the rest of the banana also.

As usual, I do some modifications to the recipes. One, I halved the recipe for the frosting because I only frosted half the batch.  The normal batch looks like this right out of the oven.

Another thing is that this looked like it would be very sweet.  At least I tend to have that feeling from some of the other recipes I’ve done from Martha Stewart’s site.  So I went 1/2 cup of sugar instead of 3/4 cup.  My mom still has to try them so she’s the final judge on that one.  That’s about all the changes I did do.

With all that said, I thought these cupcakes were fantastic.  Even with the frosting, it was JUST right.  The frosting is super nice and fluffy.  Its like banana wrapped with honey-cinnamon explosion in my mouth. I’m not a huge fan of eating too much of banana-flavored baked goods but these ones were just super good.  The cupcake texture wasn’t fluffy also, not too wet or not too dry.

I would recommend this recipe.  Its easy to make and tastes delicious.

Who likes banana flavored desserts? Whats your favorite kind? Share them with me, it’ll inspire me to try it out, if I haven’t already 🙂

Have a great weekend everyone!

Glow in the Dark Cupcakes!

Last night I went to the Halloween party and being inspired by a recipe from another blog, I decided to make chocolate cupcakes with glow in the dark frosting.  I had asked my boyfriend’s sister and she went to get the black light to make it all work.  Originally, I had wanted to do a test run of these cupcakes first but ended up doing the Pumpkin Spice Muffins instead, so I brought some of those as well as a backup plan if the others ones weren’t enough or others weren’t interested.  It will also be the first time that I used my frosting piping set that I had bought last month.

This is how they looked like at my place before going to the party:

Later on, I’ll show you what they look like under the light.  First of all, I’m going to show give you the link for the recipe.

The cupcakes are called Devil’s Food Cupcakes found on Sweet Little Thang’s blog: http://sweetlittlethang.wordpress.com/2012/07/25/devils-food-cupcakes/

She also came up the Glow in the Dark Frosting which can be found here: http://sweetlittlethang.wordpress.com/2012/09/23/glow-in-the-dark-frosting/

See them glowing? The top ones are more obvious.

First off, I’d like to say that my cupcakes are lacking a bit of decorative skills. I tried my best though and I guess they look okay.  I will try to practice more.  Now for the changes I made to the cupcakes recipe.  Instead of cocoa powder mixed with hot water, I just melted Semi Sweet Chocolate Chunks.  I also decreased the portion of butter and sugar because that just looked way too fattening.  I used 1 cup butter and 2 cups sugar (not sure about the sugar modification). As for eggs, I used 3 extra large ones.

As for the frosting, I just kept it the way it was and I think it tasted alright.  The only thing was that I ran out of time so when it said to dip 4-6 times, I only had maybe 3 or 4 times.  I’m just glad it glowed so all the hard work wasn’t wasted and plus, the friends that ate the cupcakes seemed to enjoy it.  The only thing is that with the frosting process, the green ones need to be in the freezer for an hour so it was still pretty hard when it got to the party.  Although it sat in the fridge for a bit afterwards and I think it helped a bit.  Still, it seemed to be a hit.

The whole glow in the dark concept of it as it gave a little extra Halloween spirit to the dessert.  Extra because the place was decorated with spider webs and body parts, and everyone that came was dressed up really nice to the theme.  I’ll have another post touching on that soon.  As for anyone that wants to do this, try to schedule in maybe 2-3 hours from making the cupcakes to doing the frosting and making them glow in the dark, if you plan to do it all in one day.  If not, just do the cupcakes first and then the frosting and all the remaining work another day.

So what do you think about it? You think that it would be something interesting to do? Anyone going to give this a shot? Anything special that you usually make for Halloween?

Banana Cupcakes!!

I told you that I had a lot of bananas! Last Monday, I had a day off for Labour Day (sorry for being so late) and decided to kick it into gear and bake some more.  After thinking a long time, I decided on making Banana Cupcakes.  I’m really not good with cupcakes and this time, I think I was just really tired and half asleep doing this because I mixed up the recipe and misunderstood it all over the place.

I can tell you which recipe inspired me but in reality, it turned more into my little experiment than actually following the actual recipe.  Part of me still believes that the recipe wasn’t clear anyways, but did teach me to read through ALL the recipe before actually starting it.

So, I found these recipes here:

http://www.marthastewart.com/314362/banana-cupcakes-with-caramel-buttercream

http://www.marthastewart.com/328102/yellow-butter-cupcakes

My confusion was based on using two recipes to make it.  So This was modified in the way that I was making the cupcake for the 2nd recipe and realized when I reached the point of adding the wet ingredients that I was sure something was definitely wrong with the recipe and I had already made some modifications that ended up being similar to the actual recipe that was to be done.  I just didn’t understand why it wasn’t just written out instead of referring to another recipe.  Anyways, I’m not here to tell you how unhappy I am with the confusing setup of the site.

So here’s what I did instead:

Ingredients:

4 1/2 cups flour (I don’t own cake flour, if you do, then use 3 cups of cake flour and 1 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour)

2 1/4 teaspoons baking powder

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

3/4 teaspoon baking soda

9 ounces margarine or unsalted butter, softened

2 1/4 cup sugar + another 1/4 cup sugar

3 large eggs

4 very large ripe bananas, mashed (about 2 cups)

3/4 cup milk

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350F.  Line muffin tin with paper liners.

2. Whisk flour, baking powder, salt, baking soda and 2 1/4 cup sugar together in a large bowl.

3. Cream butter and 1/4 cup sugar. Add eggs one at a time, beating after each one.

4. Using another bowl, mix bananas, water and vanilla extract together.

5. Add dry mixture to butter mixture, in 3 batches alternating with wet mixture.

6. Scrap the sides of the bowl.  Divide batter among muffin cups, filling each to full.

7. Bake cupcakes for about 20 minutes.  After, let cool on wire rack.

Here you go! This was the morphed version a la Tranquil Dreams.  I also didn’t decorate it with anything as you can see.  Decorations will be coming shortly for future recipes though because I finally bought a pastry bag set.  Despite all the changes and confusions, it turned out pretty decent.  My boyfriend actually made a weird comment which he said was a compliment about how it didn’t taste too much like bananas and had a good texture type of thing.  I found that it had a bit of a flour-y taste and I think its because of the omitting of cake flour  (but its probably also because of the misinterpretation on my part).  I found instructions to make homemade cake flour in a way.  So I’ll probably experiment with that next time in hopes of improving the taste.

You’ll be seeing more cupcakes probably as it seems like I’m having a little cupcakes and pastries type of phase.  We’ll see how things go.  Not a bad recipe though but my suggestion is maybe not to use mine but use the ingredient portions of the first but follow the instructions of the second.  Dry ingredients mixture DOES NOT include sugar..that was a mistake I made also.  Although I don’t think it made a whole lot of difference except making it a bit sweeter maybe.  I have no comparison so who knows.  Over sweetness was not an issue with how I made it.

Trial and error, right? I’m learning day by day.  Hits and misses help me improve and I definitely have, I can tell you that!

Fruity Cupcakes (infused with Sangria)!

I’m going to start right off with a confession…they weren’t supposed to be fruity cupcakes.  I had originally wanted to figure out how to make Sangria Cupcakes since there isn’t really many recipes featuring online.  The cupcakes are infused with Sangria though, since I didn’t have any red wine on hand.  It was inspired by a recipe I saw on a fellow blogger Sweet Little Thang’s Strawberry Margarita Cupcakes.  I used the same recipe but researched on how to replace the ingredients for the strawberry daiquiri mix and tequila.

Here’s the recipe for how I did these fruity cupcakes.  I did two different batches, so when with the ingredients, you’ll see and/or for the component that changed.

FRUITY CUPCAKES

Makes 24

Cake ingredients:

1 box white cake mix

1 cup fruit punch concentrate (1st batch)/ orange punch concentrate (2nd batch)

1/3 cup vegetable oil

1/4 cup Sangria

3 whole eggs

Frosting ingredients:

1/2 cup shortening

1/2 cup butter, softened

2 cups powdered sugar

2-3 tbsp berry punch concentrate (1st batch)/orange concentrate (2nd batch)

For how to make them, refer to the link above.

I followed the instructions pretty much the same as there with the exceptions of the first part.  For the cake, I mixed it by hand instead of with a mixer, therefore taking a bit more time (so there was no different mixing speeds).  I baked the cupcakes for 23 minutes, both batches turned out pretty nice at that time.

First batch with fruit punch concentrate

Second batch with orange punch concentrate

For the frosting, I don’t own any decorating bags, so I used a Ziploc bag, which is why my frosting decors aren’t as sophisticated but still, I’m pretty pleased with it.  In the second batch, I just smeared it on while I also beat it for longer and it gave it a better consistency.  Also, for the second batch, I ended up using half of the recipe as I only was making half the batch. I made the frosting a bit lighter in taste (which had some mix commentaries).

As for my taste feedback, I think both tasted pretty decent.   The first batch was more fruity and the second one was more zesty.  My boyfriend tasted both and liked them.  My friends liked it also, with and without comparison to my first batch.

So why Sangria cupcakes? Do they even exist? (A question I got a few times)  I had a BBQ to go to and wanted to bring in a bit of summer fun.  Besides, I think cupcakes can be made with whatever you want to mix it in.  Sangria is usually a summer hit so why not, right?  I did a bit of research on how to make them and eventually decided that it would be easier to just use something fruity.  Little did I know that, the fruity aspect took over the cupcake. Its back to thinking of what ingredients to use. I’m looking at replacing the Sangria with red wine and instead of the concentrate, using actual frozen fruits, probably mashed up a bit or something like that.  What do you think? Think that’ll work better? Any other suggestions?