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.

http://thisisindexed.com/2010/01/like-today-for-example/

Celebrate the little things. Your friends, the internet that lets you communicate with them despite thousands of miles, champagne and mimosas, cupcakes, whatever it is you love, celebrate it!

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!

The two ingredients in a mimosa are orange juice and champagne. While there are disagreements on the amount of orange juice versus the amount of champagne, the official International Bartender’s Association recipe calls simply for equal parts orange juice and champagne, and who wants to argue when there’s cupcakes around? We’d much rather go with what the International Bartenders say and try for a cupcake that celebrated both flavors equally!

From previous undocumented cupcake expirements, we have learned that light flavors like champagne usually get lost in the process of baking cake batter. How to fix this? We took inspiration from the mimosa itself. You start with the orange juice, and then add the champagne.

We started with a orange-flavored standard ‘yellow’ cake, exchanging orange juice for the water in the regular recipe, and replacing half of the vanilla extract with orange extract. Because of the fruit sugars in orange juice (Fresh squeezed! No HFCS for us! It’s bad for you and it tastes funny!) we had to then tweak the amount of flour and sugar and leavening agents (baking soda, baking powder, buttermilk) to account for the increased sugar in the juice, and then adjusting the baking time slightly, because increased sugar means the cake will brown faster.

As you can see, they turned out a very pretty shade of golden yellow. Isn’t that pretty?.

To add the champagne flavor, we made a flavored simple syrup. Which is, not at all coincidentally, a regular cocktail ingredient of it’s own! Normally this is two parts sugar to one part water. In our case, we used one part granulated sugar, one part Karo syrup and one part champagne. Mostly because it speeds up the process of making the syrup, because as you can see from the paragraph below, we were a little impatient to get to the cupcake eating.

Getting the syrup into the cupcakes… well, that part was a little messy, and a lot of fun. Basically, we took our oh-so-handy cupcake poking tool (You might call it a chopstick, we call it a cupcake poking tool. Okay, we call it a chopstick when we’re eating stir-fry with it, but when we’re poking cupcakes, it’s a cupcake poking tool.) and poked 5-6 holes in each cupcake and spooned the syrup over them.

Yep. Just a little messy.

We cover our worktable with butcher paper to make cleanup faster, and it’s a good thing too because maaaaaaaybe we drank some mimosas while we made that syrup. It turns out watched pots don’t boil any faster if you watch them with a glass in your hand.

We’ve been calling the frosting a champagne cream frosting, but really it’s champagne very slightly orange marshmallow buttercream. Which is really long to type out and to say and really that’s just excessive. Who needs all those words when you’re enjoying delicious cupcakes.

The marshmallow allows for a much lighter and fluffier frosting that a standard buttercream, and for a cupcake like this, a heavy frosting would overwhelm the cake and syrup. It’s flavored with a touch of orange extract and the remaining champagne syrup.

We wanted that delicate bubbly look for the frosting and after playing with several frosting tips we ended up with this effect. to recreate it exactly, you would use the Wilton Tip #136 but any frosting tip that has multiple small openings that create a lacy fluffy effect would work.




The Cupcake Test Team (IE: Our friends, family and co-workers) declared them delicious and a great way to start 2010!

What is everyone’s favorite pie flavor? We are split between chocolate silk and key lime here at Casa De Cupcake. (We have a key lime cupcake too!)

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!

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!

shirt.woot.com is amazing. They sell a different T-Shirt every day for ten dollars. Sometimes those shirts go into what they call The Reckoning and are sold for longer, sometimes that one day is all you get.

Today’s shirt? Cupcake Costume Party

Oh yes. I have purchased it. I will be wearing it. And next week at the Farmer’s Market, oh, yes, you will see cupcakes in their Halloween Costumes!

We have to admit that we too are geeks. When we’re not baking, we’re watching Firefly or playing RPG’s. We have WoW accounts and it’s just possible that you’ll see one of us at the booth on Halloween dressed like Dr. Horrible!*

* If we can find the right lab coat. Otherwise it’ll be Generic Mad Scientist.

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?