baking cupcakes!

.

i love to bake. i think i get it from my mom. one of the many things i always remember us doing together is spending hours in the kitchen making brownies and cookies and pies and scotcheroos and cakes and whatever else needed to be whipped up. thanksgiving meant multiple apple pies, christmas meant towering stacks of cookies, birthdays always had a cake...you get the idea :)

personally, i'm super duper drawn to cupcakes. i don't know why - probably because they are inherently extremely cute, and i like most cute things! also, it's all the deliciousness of a full grown cake, but bite size and with adorable frosting. how can you not like them!? i was informed a little while ago that cupcakes are a 'trendy' thing to bake lately, but i was doing way before it was cool (ok, maybe not, but i didn't realize it was the "new cool thing" until after i started getting recipe books...i promise!). in any case, i probably bake a batch once a week or so. it's usually just to try a new flavor or type of batter or maybe because someone mentioned that they like chilies and chocolate and i wanted an excuse to make chili-chocolate cupcakes. i hardly ever eat more than one so most end up going in to work for my coworkers to share or into greg's stomach. that man loves cupcakes. i have one cupcake book (called 500 cupcakes) and a few general baking books (one about cakes in general and one about chocolate) so i pull ideas from those and from the internet. there are some things, like certain flavors or fruits or nuts, that i don't really like to bake with so i tend to modify the recipes into something i do like, or mix-and-match the cakes and frostings until there's a combination that i feel like baking that week. sometimes they come out pretty delicious and i'm happy with it, other times i try to make a maple cake with brown sugar-maple frosting and i overcook the batter and it tastes like burnt pancakes. oops.

this week's baking adventure was a nutmeg cupcake with orange-ginger buttercream frosting. since i make everything from scratch (yep, even the frosting), i'm always looking for new spices to put in the cakes...i was originally in the mood to make a coffee cupcake with brown sugar frosting but evidently this state made selling coffee extract in supermarkets illegal. gahh! it turned out alright anyway since i found the sweetest little mini cupcake papers at the local jo-ann's after work today. when i got home, i got right to work...readyyyyyy, settttt, go baking montage!!

ingredients mise en place

butter+sugar takes forever

everything all added in

ready for the oven!

baked! some got a little overfilled. my bad.

minis frosted with orange/ginger buttercream. eee!!

 so all in all they ended up being pretty cute i think. the little papers definitely make them ten times cuter. i just ordered some new ateco piping tips from amazon.com because i want to try some different styles but i'm not sure if they're going to be big enough for cupcake frosting. hrm. wait and see i guess! right now i use a 16" piping bag and a big wilton star tip but i definitely need more practice before i try anything fancier. it's not easy to learn piping technique with nobody to teach you!! i'll probably take a batch of these mini nutmeg ones and give them a flat frosting (like a white ganache maybe?) and put on some patriotic decorations to take up to the lakehouse parties. easy and yummy.

the real test on these little guys will come when people try them. will the nutmeg be too subtle? the frosting too sweet? the papers too difficult to peel off? tune in next time for: fourth of july 2011: the aftermath!

L