Oh My Goodness! Cupcakes!

It’s been a long winter, and here in SoCal, we had almost two months of grey, rainy weather. So much rainy weather that we’ve gotten more rain in since January 1 than we did in all of 2009. And that’s nothing compared to the snow that our friends and family on the east coast have had. Four feet of snow in some places, between January and February’s bad weather.

There have been a few upsides to this wet weather here though. We really do need the rain, and it’s feeding all of the flowers and plants and fruits and vegetables that grow here!

What do we do on icky, wet rainy days? Bake lemon cupcakes, put them in jars and ship them to our friends who were buried in the cold snow!. What did you think we did, play Plants vs. Zombies all day? Okay, we did some of that too. Nothing says ‘icky, wet rainy day’ then happy sunflowers and other plants fighting off endless waves of the ravenous undead.

The lemon shortbread cupcake starts with our usual vanilla cake. It’s cake, it’s vanilla, we’ll mention it a lot as we talk about more flavors in the upcoming weeks. We use homemade vanilla extract, it’s a nice moist cake, and while we don’t subscribe to the belief that vanilla equals boring, we would have to make on vanilla (don’t worry, that’s coming up), to explain our love of it.

Cakes were baked, unwrapped and then put into jam jars. Each jar got one regular sized cupcake and one tiny cupcake. We had a few extra tiny cupcakes – they did not go into jars, they went into us.

Instead we’ll talk about filling that cake with lemon curd made from lemons right from the tree. (SoCal + relative with lemon tree = always having fresh lemons the size of softballs)

We were introduced to lemon curd back when we were living on the east coast. During one of our gaming nights (We play D&D. We are geeks. I mean, come on, we made a werewolf cupcakes at Halloween just so we could make a Three Wolf Cupcake joke.), a friend had brought as part of the snacks, homemade shortbread cookies and a jar of lemon curd to spread on the cookies. The cookies and curd were gone before the first monster was defeated.

Lemon curd is a custard-like fruit spread made from egg yolks, sugar, butter, fruit juice and zest. We make ours from scratch, which means it’s a fair amount of work zesting all those lemons, and whisking the curd while it cooks so it remains smooth, but it’s worth it. It’s quite tart and compliments the sweet vanilla cake perfectly.

The lemon curd that doesn’t go inside the cupcakes gets added to cream cheese frosting. It’s hard not to eat it right out of the bowl – and leftover frosting doesn’t last very long in our house, even when we generously frost the cupcakes. The great thing about cream cheese frostings is that because they’re less sweet than a standard buttercream, you can afford to frost with a heavy hand and not overwhelm the cupcakes.

Topping that frosting? Crushed cookies. Smashing cookies is fun, everyone should get to do it at least once.

We got do do this twice, because we had two kinds of lemon cookies on hand. Half the cupcakes got pieces of lemon shortbread, the other half were topped with lemon-flavored waffle cookies. Think waffle-cones, but as a cookie. Incidentally, the waffle cookies are excellent for scooping the last of the leftover frosting out of the bowl.

As we said, this time around, the cupcakes were in jars and were shipped all over the country, to unanimous response of “NOM NOM NOM” and “MORE PLEASE” and “I ATE ONE FOR BREAKFAST!” We find nothing wrong with eating cupcake-in-a-jar for breakfast. We’re grown-ups now and it’s our turn to decide what that means.

Welcome to 2010! Like many of you, we celebrated the New Year with a bottle of champagne. Since this year we had a quiet private celebration, we were left over with most of a bottle. What do we do with a leftover bottle of champagne the morning after New Years Eve? Make mimosas and celebrate some more!
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So, today was both our weekly booth at the Vista Farmers Market, AND Halloween. International Talk Like a Pirate Day was a pretty big hit last month (go see where we got blogged about!), so we knew we had to step things up a bit. We took an informal poll of our friends about their favorite trick or treat candy flavors, and then turned them into cupcakes!

We made Lime Skittles, Orange Starburst, Berry Nerds, Hershey Bar, Reese’s Pieces, Junior Mints, and Kettle Corn Balls. On top of those, we got a set of Halloween cupcake stencils from some friends in the mail just in time to use them! So we made some extra triple chocolate and vanilla cupcakes, and then went to town.

The first stencil we used was a spiderweb, so we decided to put a black widow spider on it. Black frosting, and a red M&M for the spot on the thorax.  

The other stencils we used were: a bat symbol (HOLY BAT-CUPCAKES!), a jack-o-lantern, and a witch (we did not, however, check to see if the witch cupcake floated).




Next up, we also decided to make candy monster faces. We picked up a lot of different things that wound up turning out really well. We made several different monster faces. These two were our favorites!

One sort of looks like Mike Wazowski from Monsters Inc.






One could almost be a beholder, except he doesn’t have the giant eyeball in the middle (did we mention we’re big nerds?)










We also made a jack-o-lantern and some mummies, but the definite piece de resistance had to be the werewolf cupcakes.

The shaggy effect was done with a knife and cocktail toothpick, the eyes and nose are M&Ms, the teeth are cut-up marshmallows, and the tongue is strawberry Fruit By The Foot. We’re really proud of the way he turned out, so much so that we made three of them. And then, because we had three werewolves, and because we’re great big nerds, we just had to incorporate an Internet meme. And so, we give you…

All of the cupcakes were a big hit, but especially the decorated ones, which sold incredibly fast. Normally, the mini sizes sell much better than the mediums, but today people all wanted the monster cupcakes. We normally don’t go in as much on decorations, preferring to focus on flavors, but today is Halloween, how could we not? And maybe this is a sign that we need to start decorating even more!

In addition to our cupcakes, we found the perfect shirt to wear today on shirt.woot.com!

The booth was a lot of fun today. We sold a bunch of cupcakes, saw a few trick or treaters (and rewarded them with delicious cupcakes, of course), and got asked a lot of questions and handed out a ton of business cards. Things seem to be going really well, and we’re excited to see what November and December bring us!

We make a lot of cupcakes inspired by different desserts – S’mores, pumpkin pie, Snickers Bars, and so on.

Since Halloween is a Saturday this upcoming week, we’ll be making Trick or Treat Candy Cupcakes for the farmers market! So, with that in mind, what are your favorite Halloween candies? We want to know the ones that you really liked getting in your bucket as a kid. For us, it was Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. (We love those so much we’ve already made peanut butter cup cupcakes.) How about you?

And if you’re in the area, come trick or treat at our booth this Saturday! If you’re in costume, you just might get something special!

We use the same buttercream recipe for almost all of our buttercream frostings. Without any additions, such as vanilla custard or cocoa or caramel, it will frost about 24 medium cupcakes. Sometimes a few less – the Pirate Vanilla Cupcakes we made on the 19th took more frosting than usual. Sometimes a little more – when we frost the Orange Creamsicle, it always seems like we can frost 25 or 26 before the frosting runs out.

But 36? That’s a lot more cupcakes than the batch should ever frost. But every single time we make the key lime frosting, it never seems to run out 35 or 36 cupcakes.

Well, you say, you must be adding a lot of key lime curd to that frosting? Nope! Four heaping tablespoons.

Okay, well, maybe you’re adding a lot of air? It doesn’t get mixed any longer than any other frosting – it certainly doesn’t get mixed longer than the Vanilla Custard frosting, and we also use the same amount of custard for that frosting as the Key Lime.

So obviously, we are forced to conclude that Key Lime Frosting breaks the laws of physics. Since it does so deliciously, we’ll keep making it until the universe tells us not to!

What do you think, cupcake fans?